Your green Arcadian hills do not interest me.
The bird-bright eyes of every bird cared for,
the way it is promised, the way it is written,
everyone fat on their share of sun and seed.
But I don’t see you in the dark streak of a cat
crossing the street or the regal skunk in summer’s heat
that strolls the sidewalk after dark, stopping to look at me
before moving on to its home under a neighbor’s porch,
pushing its black-white weight through the latticework.
I don’t see you in a head of lettuce, decapitated
and wet at the grocery store, singing in Orphic dissonance.
I look at your trees and see the night my mind rose up
and left the body’s bed, the skin of the moon
in your teeth.
I begged you to make the mule of my mind
come back. Do you remember what you said?
Nothing. And in the silence after that—
my head without my body, singing on the riverbed.
Bridget Lowe is the author of the book of poetry At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review , Ploughshares , Best American Poetry , Boston Review , The New Republic , Parnassus , and in the forthcoming anthology 12 Women . She lives in Kansas City.
She reads her work 7p Sept. 25 at UNLV's Greenspun Hall Auditorium as part of Black Mountain Institute's Emerging Writers Series.