Skip to content →

Halo

 

Becomes a decisive body.

Acts on its ends,

 

which is to say

hands, like cloves,

 

budding flat.

Cuts a water-wheel

 

from its body,

a jenny wheel,

 

Catherine wheels.

It is coastline and,

 

as such, sheet lightning

issuing in fragile exodus

 

and armada. Question

what seems less devolved:

 

flowers wed to hands,

etymologies, stony acts

 

of will or fate.The center

unravels no more easily

 

than a stone:

it spreads in leaves,

 

it erases itself in

strands of brilliance,

 

it unlocks in florets

through the reflective blackness.

from We Are PharaohFind more by Robert Fernandez at the library

Copyright © 2011 Robert Fernandez
Used with the permission of Canarium Books.

Published in Poems Robert Fernandez

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this (publication, website, exhibit, etc.) do not necessarily represent those of the Idaho Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities.