Affair With Various Endings
I. Kempton, Pennsylvania
Perhaps the last of the light
lifting this evening from the field of wheat
means something. Perhaps the view
includes us, and we are not errors
in the landscape
or meant to be erased. The painter, it's true,
prefers not to preserve
our figures in the brush
of hills layered into green. Perhaps he too
is careless with the truth. What lies
have you had to tell to land you here
outside Kempton, with the creek rising behind us?
How did the story sound? If I say your hand
on my thigh, the truck still idles
beneath us, tracks in the frozen road
that months from now will thaw
& heave. If I say your mouth
and the deer begin drifting
across the field, who's to say
we didn't call them out—their figures shadowy,
their eyes gem-like and glittering?
II. Undine
It was all too urgent being human.
You ordered drinks, gestured
with your hands, told stories
and the more I knew
the more I was frightened. Those evenings
the air came unpinned, got lost
in autumn & dusk, in the leaves
at the edge of the field. And weren't the edges themselves
vanishing? When you walked to the barn
[...] Read more
poem by Kate Northrop
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