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Song into holiness,
the sister has written her book—
nothing there of falsehood,
nothing invented by the poet.
Pain rides itself through the book,
though the one from Carthage
knows a blessèd life in God.
Should the author now look
carefully in a dark glass,
and the book close on a moment of joy?
Copyright © 2024 by Jay Wright. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 31, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
Somewhere between here and Belen,
the Rio Grande will narrow to a muddy bead,
no more than three feet across from shore to shore.
My friend, Nick Markulis, claims
he loves the river's color there, and will bathe
his toes in the water, and will go on and on
about a dry river in Athens that measures its life
in olive groves.
Stratis Thalassinos told me about these peculiar
waters that disappear and turn up again,
and, of course, you know of Arethusa's
fountain in Syracuse.
If you undo your do you wóuld
be strange. Hair has been on my mind.
I used to lean in the doorway
and watch my stony woman wind
the copper through the black, and play
with my understanding, show me she cóuld
take a cup of river water,
and watch it shimmy, watch it change,