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Nocturne

 

The stacks are bound

with crenellated piths

bredes and orchidlike

struts mapped to high

places that are virtual

complex scales or just

the only way to get anywhere

toward darkness made

of layers inchingly

proportional to

sound and disturbance

where gray breakers mold away

from their boundary blocks—

sleep, or the intrigues of

sleep in stepped-

off funneling flocks of

birds when you look down

like shoals glancing over

the vast reef subducting its traps—

to be close to

removed from

at once all unseen

touched-in

repentances how

are you anything

alive to such work

from The Great Medieval Yellows Find more by Emily Wilson at the library

Copyright © 2015 Emily Wilson
Used with the permission of Canarium Books.

Published in Emily Wilson Poems

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.