If, Memory,
- If, Memory,
Then where in the world are the thieves the shoulders and arms of errantry the beds empty and the beds full the black night from four corners?
And where in the body are the canticles wingbone, chestbone, ribcradle the lied of the raid of the scream we, the purely incurable credible?
Nightmare memory, armful of new moon have we not already washed the luminous of our mouths wiped the hemispheres of our hands,
Irrevocable the moment, silence become season? Silhouette of night blindness, the landscape just visible a far-away ope-broken. [End Page 154]
Juliet Rodeman’s poems have appeared in The Poets: Anthology (Cera), Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, Ellipsis, Many Mountains Moving, Peregrine, Southern Poetry Review (Guy Owen Prize), the Mid-America Poetry Review, the American Poetry Review, the Anthology of New England Writers, the Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She has taught poetry, nonfiction, literature, and composition at the University of Missouri–Columbia.
