Guidebook to Landscape: The Border

 

[I]

 

Waltz and waltz, but mostly I sit

still with sound

 

Of course, of course

The horizon begins with my body. Look

 

Look: I am disconnected

 

          Thinking of the most important body to gift this silence

          I come up empty, full of horizon

 

 

[II]

 

Because this is a border,

Because this land changes and shows you flat

is not flat, no. We resist wind here.

Mountains are part of our perspective:

Watch them grow, watch them even-out into wind. In time, in time

Mountains begin with our bodies. But for now:

 

 

[III]

 

To gather light, first look in shadows,

listen for whale moans to fill the desire we forgot

Faith in the hidden –

                    evidence in where it is not

 

Faith in absence

 

 

[IV]

 

 

I miss you.

 
[V]

 

Diagramming “not” looks like the thing       Delicate not

Not anger           not love                not light            not light

 

a lapse

 

Waltz around this,

or come up behind sound:

          constellations reach towards

          or prayers

          or tiny tiny whispers, smooth echoes

          the mosquito in the barn in February

 

We are scared:

          prayers and prayers

          whisper _______

          diagram not again

 

 

Disembodied Not:           I feel closest to you               I put Post-its of Not all over my walls       I live with Not, but not in silence, no longer a small animal but something outside of me including my eyes

 

We are not mountains    We are light

 
 
 

Joanna Doxey holds an MFA in poetry from Colorado State University where she currently advises undergraduate Liberal Arts majors. Her work has been published in Yemassee, Matter Journal (Wolverine Farm Press), and CutBank Literary Journal. Her first book, :Plainspeak, WY:, is due out from Platypus Press in late 2016.