By: Benjamin Renne
Myth (Ascending)
Look at the morning –
how it passes our heads
tuned skyward like antennae,
spines bent toward new meridians,
how thunder rises along parallels
and each inhalation culminates
in a long waited breath.
Look at the morning –
how we follow the progression
with our eyes but lose track of it
somewhere up there,
how our interiors light up
and our hearts perch in the hollows
of trees, fragrant and green.
Look at the morning –
how it shivers before rain
and then just as suddenly
turns the clouds to ruin,
how our lungs dissolve into it,
consumed by forest and light,
renewed by the solemn erasure of sky.
As if the Suburban Sky Had Wounded the Earth
Where the dog took off across wet leaves, parabolic
as the creek and the low hillside and the smooth white pine –
we made our way under
that hue of sky
the blue-yellow tangent
transparent plastic seam,
where hands covered the anguish of our limbs, a lament ossifying to stone –
you clung against the sky like a premature cherry blossom.
**
We spent hours just training for this moment,
our bodies drenched with space
our lips parted to reveal the inner seam of the sky.
We felt how deeply the meter ran,
through each syllable, threaded
with winter and stillness
coalesced into blue-red maple,
caught in the uncultivated presence of March.
**
You led the dog and a thousand pine needles, the woods
bending backward, the sun
between its leaves and yours –
How everything seemed to have a shadow now!
The problem was daylight and finitude,
when even in your absent gestures
you fluctuated brightly, aglow with the wounded earth.
We looked up to reassess the season –
not spring exactly,
but a contagious memory of it.
Benjamin Renne lives and teaches in the Washington, D.C. area. In 2017, he earned his MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Concerned with vision, elegy, and prophecy, Renne explores the ways in which the poet navigates transcendent landscapes as the cataloger and primary witness of the prophetic. His poetry and short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in SLAB, Ghost Proposal, and GFT Presents: One in Four.
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