[pastoral: in which one's faith may be seen and touched]
Always night, always a listless moon as we drive into the prairie’s thistled heart. Around us, knotweed. Its twisted foliage, the anxious spark. His body still rooms opening within a room, the staircase burning in a locked house. Reassure me, ravenous grassland. With your endless droughts. With each of your soot meadows, their heaps of dead aster. He has yet to return the hymn to my merciful throat.
[in which the song is a field, white with snow]
When the music begins, I stand at the ground’s knotted edge.
I think of the cello with its smoke filled rooms,
its one dark red note. The threshold
all stars and dead poppies. Wind
turning like a phonograph within the field’s
tangled heart. O icicled pasture, meadow
in this minor key, could the cello’s dim etude unsettle you yet?
A yellow moon limps between nerve wracked clouds.
The song pressing on like a rundown house.
The clearing’s blank stare reflected in every unlit window.
Kristina Marie Darling is the author several chapbooks, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006) and The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006). Her poems and reviews appear in The Boston Review, Shenandoah, Pleiades, Gargoyle , and Janus Head: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies . Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Prairie Center of the Arts, as well as scholarships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Ropewalk Writers Retreat.