If Emerald
Could Be a Color a Sky Could Be
She
peeled the wax back,
from
the museum statue
made
string, hung bird whistles
a
single bed,
lay
down boxes
in
a row of silver and traced
bears:
polar and grizzly,
realizing
the sentimentality of
the
color blue she
called
it Sunday, called it also
December,
handed
herself
a cake made also
from
something else.
Cheer
up she said, you
are
Sunday, you
are
still—the sky also
turned
something else
not
what she always wanted
not
what she knew
but
erased and made
a
scribbled red, just
enough
to say her place
and
held there.
What to do with thousands of dead blackbirds; or that talk we had
last Sunday
I’ve been sheen feather
sky, waiting to fly me
when starting they fall—
not float or all softly
two pounds of black: hard
on December. Blink eye and gather,
I pull bird to make body, in
wishness I teeter all edges then
over. Half light and hollow
like words I swing air, I swish
and toe tip, I flap and I fall—
fully for moments then
land all cemently, gaining
what always, they’ve known
all along.
Museum poem
Glass
blocks attached only
by
light to look through, changing
shapes,
eyes to arms, I see you
like
this: taking in color quiet
the
walls gone/ escaped through
transparent
then incandescent
we’re
left in filaments, infinity,
held
together with a knot
this
room of strands and walls
(there
again) holding what
has
always been just breath
between
words where our hands
stutter
and brush, a vibration
—the
cubes are blue
and
after hours they say
there
will be a wedding—
the
way the lake and wings are
fills
my lungs with heat.
Cindy Carlson's poems have appeared in The Madison Review,
Sentence Magazine, Shampoo, and other places. She lives and teaches
in Madison, WI where she also enjoys thinking about apple trees.
