The cemetery used to be a way
I could stand to look at the world
without the world staring back. Then
death grew an expression and turned
toward me, hanging her
set of scales from the slow-leaning oak.
Death, the invasive species that breaks
the skin, excavating spaces sealed since birth.
So this is resurrection : to be opened,
emptied, and placed piece by piece
in cases for the world to examine. Hello,
countless eyes, vast-lit catacombs
behind stranged faces. Let’s not
pretend that the world is more than
a tree, or a room : is it larger than the
objects pressing back on
the air that surrounds them?
A meteor falls to the ground and is levered
out by a farmer who uses it to build
a wall between neighboring fields.
A meteor falls to the ground and everyone
rushes to the window at its bright flash.
Then concussion, the exploding glass.
A thousand tiny meteors fall to the ground
and hiss like hot pins on snow.
I live with the window open, a dogleg
away from rooms and their object –
a delicate content, filament-fine,
between me and the leaf-churr
rocking this mild October night.
My best distance is just past
the horizon. I tip into that balance,
amazed at how comfortable
I am among the lost
hours that no longer need their names.
All night I drift, unlatching labels
from dated ablations. What is left underneath?
A simpler skeleton. Breath with no letters.
An excised, rimless tomorrow.
Virginia Smith Rice is the author of When I Wake It Will Be Forever (Sundress Publications, 2014), and Whose House, Whose Playroom (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Collaborative poems, co-written with Christine Pacyk, appear in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her most recent poetry collection, Vault Dissolve, is forthcoming from Canopic Publishing in 2025.
