When you come to the last edge,
lean your ear. Name and drop
an image still as glass:
the thing that you are not.
Listen to its falling oval.
It curves and swims,
a mote of light and mirror.
Float a moment in its silver.
Its small noise pulls on wildness,
the rope lying in your dream
like a light coiled downward,
glowing with what it wants.
The Other will rise to see you,
slide out of silence like an owl.
A thump, a sudden eye,
yellow and black and wide.
Patricia Nelson is a former attorney who has worked with the “Activist” group of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a Neo-Modernist group. Her most recent book, Out of the Underworld, is just out from Poetic Matrix Press.
