There’s a word for sadness that dwells in the small
of the back, the dell where you bury your chin. You mark
the page where the animal comes down to drink
from stale water. There’s a word for release born of grief,
tempered with soapy musk in the creases. There is no
gazelle. There’s a catalogue of frequently absent hours,
a figure of speech for ellipsis that starts at the throat
and sashays night continents, skirting veldt, dwelling eons
in tundra where underbrush is just story, fabulous tinder.
You rise several times to drink from the sink’s moony
white, under-pipes moaning like vast mammals
shimmying through canyons of sea ice, somewhere
a ledger that measures the damp of the sheets,
charts all things alluvial between first longing
and loss, breviary of the sub-zero plains where I toss,
insomniac, missing. There’s a phrase for absence gullied
just short of reckoning, ghost-damaging your rise
and falling weight inside me, there’s a verb for slow peril
logged in a commonplace book dog-eared
and oily—finger, finger. You mark the chapter where drowning
mirages into understanding, the whole book stab-stitched
or was it accordioned, a flaunt of unfolding and the pilgrim
drinking from a dirty glass.

Kerri Webster

• L14 257: The Art of Poetry (SP2007)
• L13 422: Proseminar in Writing: Poetry (SP2007)
• L13 322: Advanced Writing: Poetry (FL2006)
• L13 515: Graduate Seminar in Poetry (FL2006)