Late Summer Elegy
Jody Rambo
| poetry
Lately, I feel the days fly out into the dark trees
and vanish.
Without you whose love was air-thin and particular,
I’m left these
daughter-hands of bone that do me little good,
arms fit
for nothing but wandering vast terrain. Restless,
attuned to
wayward frequencies, I crave the open space
of fields.
Sleep rinses me little clean—& the hours keep
opening their
dark show-boxes of emptiness. Each breath—
a white button
undone. See what our hands know? How to open
the earth
at summer’s end. Watch me, I say, queen of the shades,
watch me
from wherever you are, mother, the word on my lips
five shades
of white—chalk, milk, titanium, snow. First there’s a harvest.
Then a death.
Then a field where absence in wildness begins to grow.
Jody Rambo’s first collection, Tethering World, received the Wick Poetry Series Chapbook Award, and was published by Kent State UP in 2011. Recent work has appeared in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Cutbank, Gulf Coast, Notre Dame Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. She teaches at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.