Collecting Light, and: Your Eyes
- Collecting Light, and: Your Eyes
Collecting Light
Someone wrote, “I try to collect light.”Easy to harvest the generous sun,but not hidden light—sparks living in coaldeep in the risky mine,
or the dropped knife glintingin a stream, lodged betweenrocks that might maim—these are hard-won gleamings.
Mother laid out, scimitar cheekbones,anger’s sheath still clasping her.I dare myself, venture closer,stroke her chilled brow, sparse hair.
And then a brief radiance—cloud-to-cloud lightningin the breaches between us. [End Page 149]
Your Eyes
after Cesare Pavese
Death will come, Mother,and it will have your eyes,your black eyes, furious.It will have your slick olive eyesand the scent of clematiscrushedby bindweed.It will come, your eyes incontinent,spilling liliesfrom plots edged with bones.It will have your obsidian eyes,shiny as ticks,black as your secrets,your bitter armpits,your dyed hair.Death will take your practiced smile,your shoulders, still proud, bare,your withered armstwined in embrace. [End Page 150]
Nikia Leopold is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in Poetry, where she also earned a PhD in art history. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Commonweal, and Poetry. Her chapbook Small Pleasures won the 2012 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize. She also has another chapbook, Dark Feathers, and a children’s book, Adam’s Crayons.
