Elizabeth Robinson
Flesh-Colored Cloud
overlaying the sky
overlaying a scar, a kind
of a scar.
Scars being characterized by their remoteness.
Cloud approaches,
recedes,
diffuses, as breath,
overlays lungs, also
a form of the scar, a form of scarring.
Scar is the unsolved problem,
scar as the quality that
doubles back.
Once, but no longer,
a quality of intimacy or communion
what overlays the landscape
to make the landscape
solid.
How like is anticipation to grief.
Hard breath grasping at
soft breath.
Pink cloud, uneasy pink
curtain on the
rock, of what lays
over what is
overhead, gasp at
its seamy edges.
Oukon
Smell
Emanation is translation.
The upper lip, exquisitely sensitive,
translates fragrance to the nose.
Air sticky with residue and gust.
The scent of nothing-there
discriminating to itself.
*
Eat
It may have appendages, animal and
flora, that fall
into its container of selfness: extend out. Whether
wolf or mushroom. The hunger of the
one for the other.
Hunger being the hollow that
nothing-known never knew.
But its tongue, awash in the savor,
stroking itself.
Touch
Creation is the greatest good unless
it doesn’t exist. The threads a bit furred,
hairy, beneath the fingers, like an hour
feeling time graze its back. Time’s
chafing speculation. Lost to the
rich dearth between textile
and skin.
Listen
Hearing is a pronoun, an early
state prior to music.
There where not-there, it
is subjected to great heat
that melts, molten, discrete
discretionary presence.
Evanesce. Lyric vapor.
Look
Each finger on a imaginary hand
has its own eye.
Image opaque
with glare. The fingernail is an eyelid.
Protective growth to be pared away.
Its seeming absence
sees itself. Best chipped, broken
scratching the itch of light.
Elizabeth Robinson is the author, most recently, of Rumor (Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions). She is is the co-editor, with Jennifer Phelps, of the critical anthology Quo Anima: spirituality and innovation in contemporary women’s poetry, just out from University of Akron Press. A new collection of poems, Vulnerability Index, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2019.