Poems

Man as Walnut
Head thrown back, he cries, is not ashamed, though his people are farmers and lawyers. He hollows out the nadir for sounds: the spine’s delicate nuggets, the tiny pear of green gall, a miserable wonder locked in his body and sent to the throat, that petty thief of the spirit hawking its calamities. He works at making what noises he must, stays at it, drooping like the sunflower heavy with kernels. Here with the sheets pulled taut I have thought to gather what falls, antediluvian as a psalm, but all that will emerge true as the translucent paper halving a small meat is this: were each of us to know this weeping and let ourselves, what would not come undone, whole, unhulled, from the sky?

Susanna Childress

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