All Times and All Tenses in this Moment
Copyright © 2010 by Mary Szybist. Used with permission of the author.
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In the Beginning God Said Light
and there was light. Now God says, Give them a little theatrical lighting and they’re happy, and we are. So many of us dressing each morning, testing endless combinations, becoming in our mirrors more ourselves, imagining, in an entrance, the ecstatic weight of human eyes. Now that the sun is sheering toward us, what is left but to let it close in for our close-up? Let us really feel how good it feels to be still in it, making every kind of self that can be looked at.
2018
In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung
to the dark of it: the legs of the spider
held the tucked wings close,
held the abdomen still in the midst of calling
with thrusts of phosphorescent light—
When I am tired of being human, I try to remember
the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them
central in my mind where everything else must
surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.
There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose
there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.
Even imagined ones.2003