Published in BOMB Magazine's Spring 2011 Issue, one of three poems published for their 30th Anniversary Issue:
Rink
The opening scene is shot outdoors in bitter cold:
bottle-blue dusk, which she sweeps through
more or less like a swift or a swallow, shaving whispers
off the surface of the road, that is, the ice vault
over her private black glass underworld.
The arena is bordered by rushes and canes
and just over there a shred of plastic.
Now this mise-en-scène is not
a commercial franchise, so no soft drink cans
or teenagers, likewise a lack of maintenance,
no surface grading, brushing, or injury insurance, and
you also have to imagine, if you wish to track
cause and effect, an erratic anti-depressant routine
and a shouting husband in a trailer-park
a decade ago, half-forgotten. A bird swoops by
to draft a reconnaissance whose terms
are kept from us, then dodges away.
The ice is not evenly thick, and the sky
is tending to a twilight deeper than the ice
and so two linguistic fields overlap: gray cloud,
an inscribed surface too mottled to be a mirror,
too dangerous to offer praise, echoing
the other backdrop, her various failed careers
including wife, mother, star of the rink.
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