Maureen Alsop is the author of Apparition Wren and several chapbooks. Her recent poems appear or are pending at Kenyon Review, Tuesday Journal and Georgetown Review. www.maureenalsop.com
Hedera Road
The horse returned. Miasma between doorways, time
beyond the sun. This wasn’t the first god. Just as, in the century’s last pages,
night herons returned, milk oiled, dusted in the cinnamon surface of seed. Consider
here the deity who marveled. The one
who traveled through mirrors to capture
the size of death, the curve of it inside the physical
fear of men. John,
she’d say, the body is coming. All
through the house sibyls chattered—given
reason to translate birdsong so that you might recognize her voice within
the mimicry of church bells,
her syntax, that rusted key
ziplocked in saltjar, would open the sonnet, but you
were lawless. Without convention, you reminded
her of heaven. This
is where you started. Where you felt it. Most days it was so
simple to love, and to give everything but--
neon vacancy signs, pools
of candy-light, inlets of roadside motels, like a hidden
curiosity for the obsolete—love