Afterwar/d
The finger fingers worry
beading
presentiment of the coming cold
something
April months away
then/ you do not wait
to decompose smolder
in a lick of
chilblains
independent
chronologies grieving
one
another needles amok
a
log refits itself into a pine
forest a field of sunflowers
in
the Ukraine
an
abandoned pear grove
the
earth smiles rueful
in
her bodice of fatigue
perfect
flatness after the heave
diamonds
previous or invisible
grave clues
Fragments not conducive to a zen garden
Spilling
breath to conjure a burrow
an enclave redly,
a thought cataleptic
She
thought the strange tattoo on her neighbor’s arm
was cool: a lover’s phone number the repopulation of a memory
They
shot the baby boy still in her arms
made her throw him in and left her
to
wander back to the forest
[a whine ambidextrous
She
sips breast milk from a styrofoam cup
snaps
to awaken the postcard, astounds with lung scratch to stifle the fluke
The
goldenrods bloom yearly
lacking habit, sessile
unaccustomed to a craving for extinction
Everyone
has the capacity for color
everyone has
the capacity for color
in all her habits of sadness
draped red in identities unknown, unbidden
stars fall through
fingers spitting sparks
masquerade as
light ribbons threads
as if
in a process of creation
a six-degree day
to hypothesize rivers
untangle
interstitial silences & the
sun
still 93 million miles away
headlines and
deadlines circumspection
whimsies of doors
ajar beauty turns on itself
writing the dusk into a frenzy
nary a cyclamen in
sight nary a stitch of importance
in its nether far, it is far
farther here than in the next field
prudence
knows surety as the hour of
bathing
a quaint miasma immoveable passages
looming
in the seams between dream vistas
unleavened answers
and
the waters remember pushed by a
gracious wind:
out of holding an ingot
to parse
The Trees that Grow There May Not
I myself have
taken
breaks
from blooming
later unsoiled
eventually broken
down by accident
or arson
Jaclyn Piudik (Toronto) is the author of To Suture What Frays (Kelsay Books 2017) and three chapbooks, most recently, the corpus undone in the blizzard (Espresso 2019). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including New American Writing and Columbia Poetry Review. Celan’s work being a longstanding subject of fascination and study, she has translated some of his original German poems and is currently translating his French poems into English.