“
the heart overtaken. the bare staves
waving at boughs’ ends, the musical
red wings: something
they almost say, more like a sense
hunched in darkness, an ache,
a suspicion: every time,
closer to it, closer. hear
hard light on the hillside
flatten the visible scale
into two dimensions, and you’re in love
with the flatted third:
the way it breaks you down,
over and over, to mean you are
alive. the way you rub it in
the wound that you never
come close to wanting to close—
as if you could scrub away the whirling
of everything else and come down
like snow to the center, the eye, so close
to the purity of knowing inside this
present pain, that searing
white place without wind or words.
—Alice B. Fogel, from “To the Bone,” Be That Empty: An Apologia for Air (Harbor Mountain Press; First Printing edition (December 1, 2007)
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Alice B. Fogel (Be That Empty: Apologia for Air)