In the midst of our lifelike life
I come to this fork in your hand —
stainless silver, of appreciable weight —

and I fully understand its pronginess,
the bent of want, an expressive head
and narrow neck spreading

like a delta out to three strict parallels.
You, the children, me.
At some point the waiter brought

your sea bass and the fork hovers over
its seared arrangement of chainmail,
its lips parted in surprise.

Against the stiff table linen
and sunlight on the knife
your skin is caramel and scuffed

a little whitely at the knuckles.
A few veins give the skin
its dark ridges and where each hair

plants itself there is a small dent
and crinkle in the flesh.
If the situation is not stable

nor sustainable,
what I want to mention is
if we did continue further in —

into an atom of the flesh
or the metallic fabric of the fork,
the micro-weft of the tablecloth,

it would be more or less the same
kind of utter emptiness —
as at the heart of any restaurant

there is this dead eye
of the sea bass on your plate,
its aureole lens, its lightless pupil

sunk flush as a thumb tack holding
the universe itself in place
and I stare at it, and it stares back.
from the bookFEEL FREE/ W. W. Norton & Company
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Close-up head shot of poet Diane Glancy

"There is a principle of physics working within poetry—whatever it is. Something that can’t be explained because it resists capture. Like the unifying principle that physicists are looking for, yet it always eludes them....There’s a native myth that says the creator 'sung the universe into being. His singing spawned reason, but not sufficiently. So we shall never know all that moves with the universe.'"

via LIT HUB
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What Sparks Poetry:
Tracy Zeman on Susan Howe's "The Nonconformist's Memorial"


Howe’s techniques create an altered world that a reader can step into and attempt to decipher. In the act of reading, we enter into the act of making. I loved the mystery in that process and the reader-work involved as we participate in the unraveling of established histories and the un-silencing that results....She both implicates the existing narrative and reconfigures it to create space for others."
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