PEN America 6: Metamorphoses

A golden shredding of light, slow
unfolding, the airy geometry of trees
revealed in a day by day transfiguration
of tough vegetable matter into clearer
and clearer frames of radiance, until
you scarcely know where to look, eyes
exhausted by this luminous too-much. 

Was it a day like this—a day become
all warm body, an athletic woman
in the full of her flesh-life—when
Persephone dipped her fingers into
the last flowers of the season, took up
the pomegranate and turned her back
on us, humming Put out the light

and then put out the light, and turned—
brow blazing like a new blade—into
the youngest sister of shade, a queen
of shadows, and stepped away from
where we have to stand still as trees
standing to terrible attention, again,
in the grip of winter-ice, staring after.

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