Long Nights
By Jenny Xie
Ice, entire cakes of it.
Crows feed on sand.
So poor is this season
the ground steals color
from the tree-shadows.
•
Can it be that nothing
is as far as here?
Just look!
How much past we have
to cover this evening–
•
Come to think of it
don't forget to pick
off this self and that self
along the way.
Though that’s not right–
you spit them out like pits.
•
If there is a partition between
the outer and inner worlds,
how is it that some water in me churns
between the mountain ranges?
How is it we are absorbed so easily
by the ground—
•
Long nights for simple words.
•
Slant rhyme of current thinking
and past thinking.
A chewed over hour, late.
Where the long ago past
and the future come
to settle scores.
•
Traveling and traveling,
but so much interior
unpicked over by the eyes.
•
Nothing is as far as here.
Copyright Credit: Jenny Xie, "Long Nights" from Eye Level. Copyright © 2018 by Jenny Xie. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.