Produced by Dennis Camire
This week’s poem is by Julia Bouwsma of western Maine. Her most recent book is “Work by Bloodlight,” published by Cider Press Review.
Elegy as Dusk Rising in the Road
By Julia Bouwsma
It’s the fact of the ground. My arches braid
the arced ruts each evening, light blistering away
into droplets that fall from my eyelashes, unfurl my fingers
like breath into my sleeves. I know the way home
on this dark path as easily as I sense the crawl of legs
in the middle of a dream and reach, unthinking, to pluck
the tick’s still-feeding mouth from my calf. At the next turn
I will crest the hill into the bald eye of your tractor —
its singular, cycloptic gleaming. You bend to pound
fence posts into hardened clay one after another
as a partridge instinctively drums his need
into the ground — this palpitation of flesh to land
a wing-beat that strings me feet to chest and folds
me, here, to our night road for just one more
long drink of our separately spinning shadows.
Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu
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