I am cousin to the sun, a hired
cure for darkness. My fingers
busy as rain. In my palms I hold
an invisible, melancholy silence,
a violin with no strings. I stretch
and preen in the shadows,
a pensive, swivel-hipped owl.
I’ve crawled
into crawl spaces thinner
than a thimble. I finger
the wormy wires, un-cup
the fixtures and peer
at their sex. I know what grows,
furtive as thought, in the porous
walls of houses. I step lightly
through the coffin
cough of attics and closets, among
the boxes, water-stained
and slumped in garages. I coax light
back into rooms, using screw drivers,
flashlights and sleight-of-hand—
a stooped everyman’s magician. On certain
oblique afternoons, I’ve mirrored
your neglected interiors back at you.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 16, Issue 4.
Alexandra van de Kamp lives in Stony Brook, NY, with her husband and is a lecturer at Stony Brook University, teaching academic English to foreign students. Her first full-length collection of poems, The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, was published by CW Books (WordTech Press, 2010), and her most recent chapbook, Dear Jean Seberg (2011), won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Recent poems have been featured on VerseDaily.See all items about Alexandra van de Kamp