From Monica Berlin's Poem of the Week E-mail, 9/16/06
This week's selection is another from Julianne Buchsbaum's A Little Night Comes published by Del Sol Press in 2005.
Perfect Motels
When a bird dies
it falls through the air
like the ending of the sublime.
I read all day
until fireflies start
out of livid places
and trouble the twilight
like candles in the windows
of a woman's home
flickering I'm here
I'm here to anyone
who will see.
At five o'clock,
as if the sun were a thought
in a thinker's mind,
some master passion
of a taciturn heart,
I am of two minds,
suspending things
in small nacreous
twilights of consciousness.
Take anything
to the nth degree
and it dismantles you.
After so many movements,
small wonder
a thing must die.
To alterations blue
and phenomenal as this sky,
I wake at midnight,
keeping things I
remember close
at hand and disquieting.
