When you’ve worn enough of then and soon
and gone so unsewn of the fingering light.
When brittle your heart in bone and blue,
it’s time to know—by blood through vein
a dream of unravel and ravine.
When here in the day’s last seething,
reedthin note, before the going under
and in-between, the night’s unthreading
in marrow and moon, feel away.
There’s more good of unknowing
in all of the dark—than in any some
shell bright day. When face of ice
and far, when stone, when sore
of name and answer, when threadbare shroud,
when shard, let fall. Let night undraw
the shore. You’re not yet young. Yet this
song of slow erosion and shadow shows
a brighter this that’s maybe more all
of a throatpure wish than prayer,
or any brash accretions of sure.
Robert Fanning
Robert Fanning is the author of four full-length collections of poetry:
Severance, Our Sudden Museum, American Prophet and The Seed Thieves,
as well as two chapbooks: Sheet Music and Old Bright Wheel. His poems
have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, The Atlanta
Review, Waxwing, THRUSH, The Cortland Review, The Common, and many
other journals. He is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, as
well as the Founder/Facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series in Mt.
Pleasant, MI., and the Founder/Director of PEN/INSULA POETRY, a resource
for Michigan poets. For more information, visit:
www.robertfanning.wordpress.com.
