by Lynne Thompson
-there is an under the table under the table and under that is the quick,
narrow and whorling, and beneath that, stars fallen from a heaven,
shining like feldspar, liking the sound of their life as feldspar. Farther below
someone speaks in a language lost to the world.
And beneath that
sixteen bay horses run, but unlike the wind,
they wind round and around a corral like prisoners of Zen who have keys
to an incredible door, to an unincredible door nearby,
and we who are underneath go through both doors to come out
where there is no next to, where anemones and coral and cobalt’s blue as Chet Baker,
but only for moments, because tuning, always tuning, are bassoons,
flutes, an orchestra that can’t harmonize the rattling and quaking and mizzle
misting for days to avoid everything that decrees, even in this flickering
here, in these little pieces, thou shall not-
Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon won the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. In 2010, Thompson was commissioned to write a poem to celebrate the installation of Alison Saar’s statue of Harriet Tubman at her alma mater, Scripps College. Her poems and reviews have appeared in the Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry International, Sou’Wester and Ploughshares and in the anthology New Poets of the American West.
*Photo courtesy of soapbeard.