Juliet Patterson is the author of The Truant Lover (Nightboat Books) and Threnody (forthcoming, Jackleg Press).
Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines including 26, American Letters & Commentary, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Knockout, New Orleans Review, and Verse. Her recent awards are a 2011 Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in Non-Fiction and the 2010 Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. She edits poetry for Konundrum Literary Engine Review, teaches through Hamline University and Saint Catherine University, and also works as a grant writer specializing in renewable energy projects. She lives in Minneapolis near the west bank of the Mississippi and the Great River Road that stretches from Canada to the Gulf.
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Seed Bed, Quiescence
Of you, as form,
so wound as where our words
gather possession.
As each repetition
would accrete the seed
through soil’s rime.
Pierced and touched
the husk, as where at last
our acts accumulate
to rend time’s violence
and suggest futurity
the smallest of numbers.
Thaw
A thought interrupts.
A river, blistering pine
and floss, splinters
its soft bristlecone
of touch, as before a vagrancy,
with its inevitability, why?
How different is this field
from the one I scratched yesterday
for you?
Our table is empty,
a spring curling pond
and the water advancing
away from us
apprehends a pure event
in which some flowers through snow
show survival’s grimace,
swinging clusters of red.
Long shadow, etched
inscape: how all things
rejoice
in the age to come.