Try to not exist, said the gypsy, weaving white
through wind. Red clover. Timid fleabanes,
too scared to widen beyond their small
spiked circles. A doe and fawn sauntering
through a field of loosestrife, lost to sky’s names.
Can you be in the ten thousand things and not be?
said the granite grown mossy, licheny, above
the crashing stream swirling past rocks into
eyes she scribbles in the asylum: lashy serpents,
afloat and shifting—oh, the pathos of a sunspeck
on an iris! She writes to keep the window
closed. Yet open. She lives to learn no window,
no room, no door. She lives to learn nothing.
And yet clover. And yet loosestrife. And yet foam.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 18, Issue 2.
Gillian Cummings is the author of My Dim Aviary, which was chosen as the winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize and will be published this fall by Black Lawrence Press. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, The Journal and Southern Indiana Review. She is also a visual artist.
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