Sidereal
Consider this an elegy with silo and fever.
Call it barn and gravel and gone. Grasses’ obeisance
in the wake of a pick-up, sun searing the leaves
green to gold in the season’s time-elapse.
Where does it go, the Sunday angle of sunlight
once only yours, wide and open as a window?
Here’s what I remember: the flaking mural
on the brick wall of neighborhood grocery, saying
Food for the Revolution for twenty-five years.
Stacked landscapes in my rearview, blank as a calendar
until a bend in the road brought the Blue Ridge;
the pocked metronome of tennis balls outside
while I harnessed what I had lost and missed
in minor-key pentameter. So what, my mentor
talked back to his tercets in draft after draft:
so what so what so what. “This essay is accurate
but never ignited,” the Derridean scrawled
in red ink when I was writing about Bishop writing,
I can scarcely wait for the day of my imprisonment.
Her keen eye ever cast on the homely unheimlich.
Call this a road story about the slow burn of foliage,
about containment, what conspires against arrival.
Astonish us, Diaghilev said to Cocteau,
but all I ever wanted was to consider,
its roots in the auguries of our shifting stars.
Copyright © 2023 by Debra Allbery. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 11, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Sidereal’ is, as the poem declares itself, a road story, a cross-country retrospective traversing decades. It is, as it also states, an elegy—in part honoring a past teacher, Larry Levis. The ‘so-what-so-what’ refrain is his, handwritten above a line on an early draft of his poem ‘Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex.’ That self-interrogation set in motion a poem of motion that longs for dwelling—as did the swirl and vortex of etymology, sidereal and consider both deriving from sidereus, meaning ‘star,’ itself of uncertain origin.”
—Debra Allbery
Debra Allbery
