DAGNE FORREST

Cento of Falling

Here all I am
is falling,
falling forward & down,
all the time, except the split second, except—
in the what-if, in the questions
burning like my tongue.
Nothing to be done.

I was taken with the plummet, sheer meteor,
the final thump against the ground,
and the sound of my own voice—
graced with a little tremor,
the way a door sings on opening.

Tangled on the neglected side of a hill,
a new-made, inevitable world 
of one’s own arrived, shattering 
air, pulling out stars,
a part of music. A way a body keeps time,
falling forward & down.

The little fires set
in my ear, and in my eye,
out of sight:
a single patch of ground, say, just
the red clay of grief
on the far safe side of becoming.

The lines in this poem are from: “Danger of Falling”, Patricia Goedicke; “Elegy Falling Forward & Down”, Iliana Rocha; “Over Time”, Martha Collins; “what if”, Claudia Rankine; “The Hitchhikers”, Diane Wakoski; “Headwaters”, Reg Saner; “Falling: The Code”, Li-Young Lee; “Divination”, Stacy R. Nigliazzo; “Bureau of”, Joyelle McSweeney; “On Opening”, Mark Wunderlich; “Head Itself”, Laura Riding Jackson; “Falling”, James L. Dickey; “On Falling (Blue Spruce)”, Joanna Klink; “Dress Form”, Brenda Shaughnessy; “Illumination”, Natasha Trethewey; “On the Decline of Oracles”, Sylvia Plath; “The Glass Essay”, Anne Carson; “Not So Much an End as an Entangling”, Linda Gregerson; “Rebus”, Jane Hirshfield; “The Glens of Cithaeron”, Donald Revell.

Counting Down Cento

The ticking of the clock at night.
I’ve worn into the ticking, the night —
every day unfurls 
          fresh tendril — a road that leads into
the ticking, the night.
Here we are in our bodies,
trees wearing their winter branches
without worrying about breathing,
this gradually falling-apart era alive,
an insistence of notifications
(news we've chosen to ignore),
a catastrophe that has already occurred.
For a landscape, it is distinctly quiet.

Remember when we couldn’t wait for summer?
In May, lilacs arced over the road in a cascade
made of almost nothing but being alive,
the soft blush.    We thought we knew about the
new wilderness, eternity,    
          every day unfurls as it must,
through the spiral passage of an ear.
Cracked asphalt. Dawn arrives as a bruise,
summer lingers, but it’s about ending.
The cherry blossoms of August,
sweet night wind like cider,
October’s Full Blood Moon, come and gone.
The ticking of the space heater glowing orange
in the sky. I want to feel
how distance expands when you leave,
whitens and swallows its dull stars—
in perfect time.

The lines in this poem are from: “Revelation at Cap Ferrat”, Clarence Major; “The Crone at Her Sink”, Donika Kelly; “Oolong”, Adrienne Su; “A Night Without Bombs”, Rachel Neve-Midbar; “Waiting for Happiness”, Nomi Stone; “Sunday Constitutional”, Ann Fisher-Wirth; “Our Bodies”, Michael Bazzett; “What Does It Say”, Tess Gallagher; “an aubade of collective nouns”, Bex Hainsworth; “Parent’s Pantoum”, Carolyn Kizer; “From ‘Unexhausted Time’”, Emily Berry; “Mangroves”, Terese Mason Pierre; “Heat”, Linda Hillman Chayes; “Midsummer”, Arthur Sze; “Turnip”, Jane Hirshfield; “Warming Her Pearls”, Carol Ann Duffy; “Seafarers”, ‘Gbenga Adeoba; “The Robot Sings”, Hailey Leithauser; “The Deathwatch Beetle”, Linda Pastan; “fever dream”, Junxin Tang; “Late Summer”, Jennifer Grotz; “Some Pink in Your Color”, Amy King; “Dust to Dust”, David Baker; “Owls”, Liza Katz Duncan; “Winter Morning”, James Crews; “Pigeon Poem”, Dimitri Reyes; “last flight”, Rob Madden; “Morning Song”, Sylvia Plath; “Becoming a Redwood”, Dana Gioia.