A Feeling Right Before the Feeling
At sunrise the deer eat
pieces of the quiet, they eat spaces
between the quiet
& the sounds—;
& the numbers on the calendar
lie flat in their boxes,
they leak through tiny holes
in the minutes,
evenly so, so evenly,
an active sense, before
the sense was made…
There, now, opposite to set down,
the agreed-upon, the shape
of the obvious
drawn by an earlier
enchantment before the new
anxiety set in:
the workers are safe;
the terror stilled for an hour;
a lover’s outline, dreamed or imagined,
before you read the one-page book
again, what was that book,
it had no copyright—
& what was before?
a life, the dazzler, the dark,
the singing dust, it turned
when you turned, it orpheus-knew
what you forgot when you took the bowl
of burning time across the room—
& if the previous is closer
to you now, should you
look, doesn’t matter if you do,
you carry the some of it
with it, out into it—
for LG
Copyright Credit: Brenda Hillman, “A Feeling Right Before the Feeling.” Copyright © 2018 by Brenda Hillman. Used by permission of the author for PoetryNow.
Source: PoetryNow (2018)