The Morning
Lying still under a swift fan,
I understand significance.
By a window you have also lain formless,
in a warmth and in a passing rain.
Categories line the wall
where the blinds tear the light into strips.
The sky now flowered grey
can erase the star. The window
changes colors, the light widens and it thins.
I can see what I am not for you.
Not a vespered flower or a resting heart,
but a mind pulled on a lilac wave.
Time passes like an oar through my soul.
The universe is playing
its finest hour of material.
Christine Gosnay‘s first book, Even Years (Kent State University Press, 2017), won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, POETRY, Image Journal, AGNI, The Missouri Review, The Poetry Review, The Florida Review, and Ecotone, and has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Her chapbook The Wanderer was the 2019 title in Beloit Poetry Journal‘s Chad Walsh Chapbook series. She lives in Mississippi.