(PROSE POETRY)
2 POEMS
CHARLES RAFFERTY
2 POEMS
CHARLES RAFFERTY
An Omelet for the Sedges
Let’s say that you’re wild eggs, that she has lifted you out of the prairie grass before a wall of advancing flame. There is some confusion. A premature hatching is one way of thinking about it. An omelet for the sedges, another. Nevertheless, you learn to love her basket of old sweaters, the reading lamp she bends above you and never switches off. It burned her once when she leaned in close to check on you — waiting for the yolk to coalesce, for the hook of your beak to enter her side of the world, the place you have come to call everything.
Let’s say that you’re wild eggs, that she has lifted you out of the prairie grass before a wall of advancing flame. There is some confusion. A premature hatching is one way of thinking about it. An omelet for the sedges, another. Nevertheless, you learn to love her basket of old sweaters, the reading lamp she bends above you and never switches off. It burned her once when she leaned in close to check on you — waiting for the yolk to coalesce, for the hook of your beak to enter her side of the world, the place you have come to call everything.
I No Longer Worry About Drowning in Misnamed Water
Some days I can’t tell the difference between a treble clef and ampersand. I confuse the silhouettes of raven and crow. I say phooey to distinctions. Planet or star, it is just a light that will disappear — snuffed by the blueness of the blazing day. If the lake is big enough, it looks like an ocean, but the taste of it doesn’t matter. Whatever boat you cross it in will kill you when it sinks.
Some days I can’t tell the difference between a treble clef and ampersand. I confuse the silhouettes of raven and crow. I say phooey to distinctions. Planet or star, it is just a light that will disappear — snuffed by the blueness of the blazing day. If the lake is big enough, it looks like an ocean, but the taste of it doesn’t matter. Whatever boat you cross it in will kill you when it sinks.
Charles Rafferty’s most recent collections of poems are The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017), Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018), and The Problem With Abundance (Grayson Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. New prose poems are forthcoming in Plume, Gargoyle, Rhino, and The Southern Review. He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, as well as the 2016 NANO Fiction Prize. Currently, he directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches at the Westport Writers’ Workshop.