Its Room, Our Moment of Attention
I.
We bend to the page, to the study—
in watercolor and body color
on vellum—to the figure of the hare.
Hoffman posed it, all but one paw tucked
in its crouch, stippled white on the ear’s
soft fell, but did he bend, did he pour
the warm curl and pulse of its body
in the beaming cup of his hands, rake fingertips
through the fur grain’s sweep, through hazel guard hairs
into the down? And mirrored in the dilated,
upturned eyes, can you, she asks, see a room’s
bright window, panes of light. And can you see
how the selfsame light pours into us,
the shine of attention, of tenderness.
II.
Figure 22, Wing of a Blue Roller.
Azurite coverts pale into teal euclase,
viridian-traced, and from cyan
the primaries curve into cerulean
and end the late blue of a dark hour.
At the umber scapulars, the down astray,
stained red—color spilled as the wing was pulled
from the body of the bird. How? she asks,
how did this ever happen.
Life closed in a stifle, a joint cleaved
as cold morning lapsed into cold afternoon.
The table pristined of blood, a limb
articulated in suspension,
its intensities held in shadowless light.
III.
Inching lockstep in high summer stop-and-go.
Bead wires spine up to the sun from blown retreads.
Dry silt ponds at the pavement edge.
What something
do you spy? The slants of hard white
channelizing lines, the rock-flour turquoise
of the hydroseeded bank. The cabled median’s
yellow scotch broom, notchleaf clover blooming
to purple in the unmowed gore,—
as the cataract roar of the highway restarts,
out the straight green shadows of the managed
forest stand, a cottontail darts to the shoulder. Don’t cross
little friend, she says. She says little friend
do not cross stay put stay put but it runs and the moment,
sudden, embraces all your held breath holds dear.
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Joseph Tate is a writer based in Seattle. His poems have appeared in E·ratio, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Measure, Yemassee, and other publications. He’s also published and lectured on prosody, Radiohead, and Shakespeare.
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Giuliana Eggleston is a writer and photographer living in Acme, Michigan.
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