in a low himalaya, and: in the young
- in a low himalaya, and: in the young
in a low himalaya
my son breathes to leave me to leave the lean-to of family: extended and penal he leaves to breathe up on the highlands one among many wandering breathers and sitters who sleep in the rain: gone in the tide of the primal my son washes his hands of the west wind breathes in the sorrows I gave him the breathing once hovered over he rocks back and forth squinting as he shines in the rain a rain frail with potential / total and pale and unnoticed… closing his eyes / inhaling: he holds our breath [End Page 68]
in the young
we love them too much to see them— the young ones: cloaked in their national faces of beauty / safe in their ridiculous shoes :: warmed as if wrapped in robes woven from the hair of ancestors we—their prairie handmaidens we love them too much to love them / we release them like salmon to spawn and want them to absorb us like pollen take us up to be loaded / fermented and spun into honey or taken back to be eaten and lived in— chewed up and spat into comb [End Page 69]
Mark Conway is director of the Literary Arts Institute at the College of Saint Benedict in Saint Joseph, Minnesota, and is currently completing a third book of poems, time the blue father. His poetry has appeared in the Paris Review, Slate, the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review Online, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Bomb.
