You’re Surrounded by Martha Silano

You’re Surrounded

by green forgiveness, reprieving siskins, summer’s narcotic sorbets.

It’s difficult to think about disappearing at the six o’clock hour

in late August, the unlacking light, the dinner

of sour and breakdown, a roadway of strain, the lit votive

of asking: What was a rose, a bud, a thorn?

So much of the past is like the fog 

you wake to, unable to see beyond the Dumpster

or the tunnel slide. Waiting for the foibles 

to vamoose, the fuckups to flee.

Most of the day had been a rose: Pterosaur herons, woodpecker peel,

groves of Pacific madrones. The bud a new friend who lives 

in Pennsylvania, sends missives about her dream view:

dolphins and cormorants, when her actual office abuts 

a computer lab. When your daughter asks

but what was the thorn,

should you share the list that begins with pinkeye and croup,

ends with carrion beetles and coffin flies?

One luminosity gives way to another—

the annoying spotlight piercing your bedroom window, 

though also an almost-full moon,

a small chunk missing 

from the upper left, two planets you can’t see but imagine rising over the harbor. 

And what about your day, my dear? What vexed the traffic

of neurons in your cosmos-resembling brain?

All week taking photos, trying to capture the uncapturable, a week’s worth

of two-hundred million firings per second, a small fraction

of the two-three billion fired in a lifetime. Annoyed

the blinds are cheap, inferior at blocking the punishing light. 

This close to the sea, surrounded 

by the birthplace of tears.

Martha Silano has authored five poetry collections, most recently Gravity Assist(Saturnalia Books 2019). She is co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice.  Martha’s poems are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She teaches at Bellevue College. 

15 November 2021