Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Isolato
The ox is slow but the earth is patient.
The ox is in a war
of many tiers but no engagement,
like folds within a bellows
that broke from the accordion
(war to be alone in a shiftless wind
that does not answer,
war to be the only
child in existence, even frozen,
be the only sound that plows the only land,
and as the only one,
be dumb to all remembrance
of how small or strong or round
it ever was, how much work there is
undone, how long it’s been
since any form of water has come down,
all thought about the whip,
how sharp it is against the moving bone,
all gone).
The earth is patient in this war,
knowing binds and chains
enflame the skin, and skin, like soft terrain,
loosens into freedom for the thorn,
and the thorn, squeezing from the tissue
like a devil or a leech,
bleeds into an almost touching song.
Larissa Szporluk is the author of two books of poetry, Dark Sky Question (Beacon Press, 1998) and Isolato (University of Iowa Press, 2000), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize (the title poem of which appeared in AGNI 51). She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University. (updated 2002)
Szporluk’s collection Dark Sky Question was reviewed in AGNI 51 by Jim Behrle.
Another collection of Szporluk, The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind, was reviewed in AGNI Online by Kristina Lucenko.