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  • Patience:—A year after the storm
  • Rodger Kamenetz (bio)

If sadness is a river where does it lead? Down below the rocks, to the source of sadness? My geology is bad. Is there a Pontchartrain of sadness, a still lake, while moonlight scrapes above tucking tides like blankets? In salt we find the cure for grains of night. But sadness washes everything along with it down below the earth. It doesn't matter about the geology. It never did. The earth goes on singing its old songs; it drags the sky with it through the dark vacuum. You see none of it, you have blue eyes like ancient seas: you have eyes with sky in them. Tears are the dew. Slowly in the giant lake of sadness, impurities settle to the bottom, our life in minerals.

We have been filtered by a vast amount of time but don't know it, only the hand knows it in the history of paws and tendrils. Ah yes flowers are genitals. Poppies rise from the earth in green hoods. Snapdragon faces. Calla hermaphrodites. Time has inherited them all. And the river will never run dry.

Rodger Kamenetz

Rodger Kamenetz, whose most recent book of poems is The Lowercase Jew, is Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He is also author of The Jew in the Lotus, Terra Infirma: A Memoir of My Mother's Life in Mine, and other books.

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