Burning Zither
The street grew only strangers. All the faces we were wore slings. An ingrown arena peered out from our sigh. We spread ourselves out to feel the glass in a crowd. We prayed to a dog, then some flies. Our solo was a burning zither, not a kite.
Copyright © 2017 by Eric Baus. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 30, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem begins in the form of a walk and ends up somewhere else, in a weirder middle distance. It assembles a song from small acts of recognition, gathering a chorus. I wanted to play a landscape as if it were an eroding instrument rather than try to freeze one scene in time.”
—Eric Baus
Eric Baus
Eric Baus is a graduate of the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the PhD program in literature and creative writing at the University of Denver.