Print This PostIN A FAMILIAR CITY
where the grass and the gravel tic-tic-tic
on the pavement, the morning
sprinters, or on the mountain
where there are no trees, or just one,
grown light and thinned out of the rock:
there might as well be music.
There might as well be a certain resting
sky, and a picnic to which we are invited.
There is plenty of room.
The flowerboxes are full of ice. At home,
where the loss has always already happened,
and the birds have only just come back,
the trouble and clench of your fingers
are irretrievable in the room’s
studio-bright light. There are onlookers:
white dress left over a door. Day-moon,
hole in the sky’s blue body-armor.
How small the road seems
in comparison, the lean starts
of redbuds spiked up the drive.
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Brittany Perham’s recent work may be found in TriQuarterly, Lo-Ball, Linebreak, and Drunken Boat. Her first collection of poems, The Curiosities, will be available from Parlor Press in November 2011. She is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University, where she held the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from 2009-2011, and she lives in San Francisco. You can visit her website at www.brittanyperham.com.
