Comfort in Order

Among the symphonic intervals of trees, no music
we carry one another, invite the sins of nature, then kneel
and wait for snow to hang from the crests of our evergreens
with alphabetic precision and poise, wait for the earth
to wither us to the long reeds of our bodies, where grief
courses like breath through a flute.

Andrea Baker’s most recent collection of poetry is Each Thing Unblurred is Broken (Omnidawn, 2015). She has been a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellow, and in 2005 she was the recipient of the Slope Editions Book Prize for Like Wind Loves a Window. She is also the author of a not-quite-graphic-novel Famous Rapes (Water Street Press, 2015), which looks at the depiction of sexual assault from Mesopotamia to the current day.