Maureen Alsop
PAESTUM
PAESTUM II
Dawn’s pink progression. Once desired. And for a time light translated snow—shifted dim habitation through trees. Strange anchorage. Now, a soundless, sawdust-fed hailstorm.
This photo of their hands entwined: oyster colored ribbons travel without argument.
Dilation June
Red Geraniums give us past tense—as do skylark’s continuum. The window’s expression in steady spasm. We traveled further from dream, but with greater accuracy. We traveled the char scented east, leopard vine, into patterns that masked croquet-human forms. You came to salvage the vanished. Half- entering the cedar room where high beams bordered sky. Impress for which there is no sound. No line of magnitude. No tap water.
Birch boughs cast upward as interior valleys. Circuitous disturbance. Our decay is sleep-gouged. Bouquets art-deco trinkets: a clustered, unnamable gauze, halo.
Vibration’s desire is touch. Amid the too late silence, moss hollow’s ash gray canopy. A migrant records. Then mouths wide for love.
These projections are counterweight. Tainted. What was it your grief worshipped? What household did you betray? Who did you concede?
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Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of four full collections of poetry including Mantic, Apparition Wren, Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming), and Later, Knives & Trees (forthcoming) Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines including Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, New Delta Review, Typo, and Barrow Street. Her awards include: Tony Quagliano International Poetry Prize, Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. She edits poetry for Poemeleon, and teaches through the Inlandia Institute and online with the Rooster Moans poetry cooperative.
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PAESTUM
Night’s proportion: an atrium inhabited by sea,
blue mineral bales—measured clouds which shape
waterfront. Forsythias imprint stone. Yellowed
articulate are you
mostly gone.
Symmetry named us collusion. And
I came in interface, as warning, recognition. You circle shadow’s
tilt. So the horse beneath the dark leaves melts— Maybe
it was a temperate season. Ice filling buckets, music, a garden. Or we simply lost
our words. Centuries woke between. Ionic meadows. Oh papery lips, between
voice. Why won’t you touch similarly my dead?
They gather wind in the chest, a strange dust off oleander.
PAESTUM II
Dawn’s pink progression. Once desired. And for a time light translated snow—shifted dim habitation through trees. Strange anchorage. Now, a soundless, sawdust-fed hailstorm.
This photo of their hands entwined: oyster colored ribbons travel without argument.
Dilation June
Red Geraniums give us past tense—as do skylark’s continuum. The window’s expression in steady spasm. We traveled further from dream, but with greater accuracy. We traveled the char scented east, leopard vine, into patterns that masked croquet-human forms. You came to salvage the vanished. Half- entering the cedar room where high beams bordered sky. Impress for which there is no sound. No line of magnitude. No tap water.
Birch boughs cast upward as interior valleys. Circuitous disturbance. Our decay is sleep-gouged. Bouquets art-deco trinkets: a clustered, unnamable gauze, halo.
Vibration’s desire is touch. Amid the too late silence, moss hollow’s ash gray canopy. A migrant records. Then mouths wide for love.
These projections are counterweight. Tainted. What was it your grief worshipped? What household did you betray? Who did you concede?
Cancelation Template
Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of four full collections of poetry including Mantic, Apparition Wren, Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming), and Later, Knives & Trees (forthcoming) Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines including Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, New Delta Review, Typo, and Barrow Street. Her awards include: Tony Quagliano International Poetry Prize, Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. She edits poetry for Poemeleon, and teaches through the Inlandia Institute and online with the Rooster Moans poetry cooperative.
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