When you come open, liquid like the morning lake, I swallow up the shadows I play cold moon
- When you come open, liquid like the morning lake, I swallow up the shadows I play cold moon
after Paul Claudel
A little younger, a little window,what little else to do. A brute mansion.A brick core. The glory of fornication
between and among incidents. Oh,I am like a man thinking he is like a little girl.You can't compete with force.
Can't compete with mastery. Can't combinethe moment into movement. What we hear,what our viscera bonds to,
models the bounds of the moon.We can't stop but come in. A door makes sense.My idea of gender has to do with height.Or with the human ocean.
A window opens onto the Midwest.We walk toward the mansion—a mirage.You invest in your routines. Again a departure.
We order a placement. We love like a builder.You don't know your bottom line.
You make a sadness we withstain.We make what's preceding clean. [End Page 47]
Laura Wetherington's first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence, 2011), was selected by C. S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. She has poems in or forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Sonora Review, BathHouse Hypermedia Journal, Fence, Otoliths, Verse, Eleven Eleven, and others. Her chapbook, Dick Erasures, is available as an e-book from Red Ceilings Press. Her current work includes Emily Dickinson erasures and translation experiments.
