I Face East (Ars Poetica)
where the light, at this hour, fails
to encounter my body—body
of cold grass & grammar; body
of calcium & sound. I emerge
from the room, stripped of all
urgency: runny with vowels
a e i o u behind my teeth, like some
old tide I’ve known forever, come
rushing over my mouth: each
syllable a chime across a horizon-
line, each syllable nudging
the scalloped edges of a chestnut
tree—melt a unit into a word
into a sound. leaves sway
& prickle. I hold the words
by their roots & quietly, let
them go. they land on another
boulder, lurk in a body of water,
strum someone else’s tongue. in
my body, I am spun by a frequency
of vibrations, a vocal chord slipping
into labor. to speak of prayer
is one thing. to swim
through it? another.
Copyright © 2025 by Carlina Duan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 31, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this poem while living in the Midwest, after a period of writer’s block. This poem arrived after a daylong encounter with the Great Lakes and vegetation of the land around me. This poem thinks through my relationship to poetry and reverence; to writing as a labor of sound. I was drawn to the double-loop of couplets, which reminded me of the image of water rippling and receding, and also of the orbital exchange between a listener and a speaker. In this ars poetica, I imagine the poem as a kind of listening body—porous to the world again.”
—Carlina Duan
Carlina Duan
