Leslie Harrison
& everything increases the wars the numbers the cities

& doors admit people into houses

& gates exclude people from the lands

& we make snow globes those perfect lives under glass

& we imagine skates gliding happily forever across thin ice

& the lights are always on always golden

& beacons steady in their welcome

& the ice never breaks

& nobody goes under

& the fish see etchings in the sky contrails carved by shadows and blades

& there are no planes no roaring silver birds no towers

& even violence causes only weather

& the next storm coats the town with glitter and prism

& even a toy is a lesson in secrets

& the fish are an uncertainty experiment

& deep in the pond we pretend a shipwreck

& the fish are all named Heisenberg

& the people are made unknowable made entirely of secrets

& the absence of touch

& somewhere in the scene a frog has frozen solid

& sugar prevents ice from breaking his heart

& his voice in the spring will be mighty

& spring will never come to the globe

& the one gesture of a tree

& the bare branch the bird endlessly perching

& nobody has to stop skating

& put away the skates and leave the beautiful snow

& go through a doorway

& into another world

& the people glide between the golden lights and the golden fish

& Iive in sudden storms of shining snow

& they're cradled in distant unreachable hands

& pierced by ice

& saved by sweetness
from the journal MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
One day, on a long, early spring bike ride, I rode past a water-meadow cacophonous with spring peepers, and I wondered how these tiny frogs survive winter. That wondering is the genesis of this poem. They're poor diggers, so they hibernate in places likely to freeze over, but a high concentration of glucose in their bodies prevents the formation of ice shards in freezing temperatures, and this allows them to survive northern winters.

Leslie Harrison on "Hibernacula Parable"
Cover to Dana Levin's new book, Now Do You Know Where You Are
"Book Club Reviews and Recommendations"

On Dana Levin's new book, Now Do You Know Where You Are, Ron Charles writes, "Levin has little patience with flourishes, lovely or otherwise. Her sly poems interrogate the most profound questions of human life while staying rooted to the concrete language of ordinary experience."

via THE WASHINGTON POST
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Buying Books This Week-End?

Purchase your books, whether or not you discovered them on Poetry Daily, at our virtual bookstore on Bookshop. Every book you buy helps to bring the best contemporary poetry to you every morning.
Graphic logo for the creative campaign, When is Now
What Sparks Poetry:
CAConrad (THE OPEN ROAD) on Ecopoetry Now 


"Remember a few years ago, I asked you to cut my arm with your bowie knife, so I could write a poem while observing my cells in their 27-day repair cycle? There is something special about having the body be part of the writing experience, and with these birds and animals in the desert, each one is assigned a spot on my body....Locating an animal on myself is an incredible way to enter the writing."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2022 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency