Two Poems by Molly Spencer

ROWING, AND THEN LIGHT

The lines given me by the river, I’ll leave to the river.

Islands of sky flicker the brim, and then

light

on the tangled marsh.

Light where the cedars toppled

bone-like and silver. And later, hours of slow progress, 

marsh grass and the unrushed wandering of water, 

the heron

unseen alongside, the heron 

rising blue and somehow silent

though surely such unfolding has a song

or a cry——the heron lifting, the heron breaking open

into flight.

And who can I tell this to now——the children rowing on 

ahead of me, the far west of you? 

                                                    This is my account:

I didn’t see the heron edgewise

then I saw it.

Wasn’t rowing at all, only dipping the blade of my one oar

here, then there, to steer a little. 

Let me drift, going nowhere, in the moment

the heron met my mind

though the moment was flawed and devoid

of meaning.

The cedars were not silver, not bone-like, the heron’s flight

not soundless.

I’ll speak of this to no one.

The river bears me along.

COBALT JAR IN MORNING LIGHT

In the second blue hour, the gap

through which the day slips

asks for an accounting—

what might have filled it,

what litany, what task. I have

no answer but my usual blue

spiral through the acts of tending,

wiping down the counter

wringing out the cloth

smoothing a wisp of Laura’s hair

with my first two fingers 

as she asks, Mom, is it true

they’re digging trenches

for all the bodies? O, holy

tattered nouns breaking off from

the world and settling 

before us—a syllable, a bowl 

cracked but still in use, a trail

of moth-thin petals

pink and tracked in

from yesterday’s rain, how I work

around them while sweeping.

Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, and editor. Her debut collection, If the House (2019), won the Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge​ (2020) won the Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. Molly’s recent poetry has appeared in Blackbird, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her critical writing has appeared at The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. She teaches writing at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. ​