- How Many Times My Eyes Have Opened
Each new earth, once unlidded, works a change.
I blink, I blink, no ideawhat scrub this is, the evergreensnot quite green, or any color.
A right-angle of timberis the side of a house.
Yes, I think,
the houseI was born in,
beside its plots for poppies,its Library for the Futurewhere parents storedthe little black seeds—
so I might wander back from exilenot wholly erased.
Of course, I do go back.
She takes shorthand. He delivers tools.They don't know yetwhat's to see, what's to lose.
O always, are you always always always? [End Page 32]
A silence spoken by earthquake,a canyon dropping toward center.
But they are ready for me somehow.Light bounces, and I blink.
Here you are—they hand over the housein jagged, jigsawed glass. [End Page 33]
Paul Nemser's third book of poetry, A Thousand Curves (2021), won the Editor's Choice Award from Red Mountain Press. His book Taurus (2013) won the New American Poetry Prize. A chapbook, Tales of the Tetragrammaton, appeared from Mayapple Press in 2014. His poems appear widely in magazines. He lives with his wife, Rebecca, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harborside, Maine.