2022 Academy of American Poets Prize

from Black Swan Theory

by Kyle Marbut

What I saw from my bed of Nights. Appearance and disappearance as planetary behavior. One place in deep naught can be another. Second earth in the sky, flickering. Second self, looking down. Who went down the hill and how. Not falling but lapsing. Never touching the slope. The deer, without shadows, their antlers ever in velvet. And after, another gift. I can't keep accepting boxes of dawn from the window. What I shattered to no avail. Featherweight wrought to the light. Billion-pound stare bearing down from the sky. A sense that every roof is slowly caving in. I knew enough to make a blade of the light. Moonbeams on fresh snow stretched the blue hour through midnight. Our minor gods in silhouette, framed in white, stooped and eating fallen sky. The grass, licked clean. How I wanted to believe an early spring. Yes, I made a blade from the light, pricked myself on what slanted through unseamed clouds into the center of an eye I opened twice. Your déjà vu is not my problem. This an opening a god could slip through. A lack of breath. Nothing is that cosmic. Whatever you think I’m capable of, divide it by light. Pricked my finger on a sundial and fell through a few thousand days. I lied like any other mirror. Birdless, birdless, I never ask why. If I am innocent, punish me anyway. Language, quantum in the body by which I mean the mind. Hoarded stemless birdbaths, altars of reflected sky, mosquito larvae. I needed an other for this to be. I love the world until it’s real.

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2022 Academy of American Poets Prize

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from Black Swan Theory

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