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Rest
each time I think of you, you cease to be
-Jacques Roubaud
A bird, a stone – the body
is overturned. We lay it down
and call it “bolts of cloth.” Also
“lands of unlikeness.” Like a
phonograph, it is proof
we render the natural to scale,
more than motion, an incantation
brought back to the slick wreath
of human expression. Listen:
the page shudders, yes, like a sea.
Listen: who can hear the rest (only the rest)
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Christina Mengert is author of As We Are Sung, forthcoming from Burning Deck Press, and co-editor of 12×12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in 2009. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder and through UCLA’s Writers’ Extension Program.
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