Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Lenox Aubade
for Amy Clampitt
I grew my hair out
in a depression. Let it knot
into a forum for the birds
in my thoughts, sparked
into actuality
in the wee dark. What wills them
awake? An early
sentry, then the rest
beckoning? Coordinates rising
when stars in the lifting night
are falling.
Letting them nest,
I felt their joy
accumulate, until I was ugly
no longer, but a self divorced
from a body:
beach of grit
and sea glass, bit driftwood, God-
forsaken ovaries, ashes
buried beneath a listing tree, decades
of love, the burned,
uxorious husband.
Becoming the sleep
of the sleigh bed, convinced
by a piccolo hither
and flourish, bashful
and easeful notes, a bridge of love-
making scoring sun
across earth again.
Paula Bohince is the author of three collections: Swallows and Waves (Sarabande Books, 2016), The Children (Sarabande, 2012), and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (Sarabande, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, AGNI,The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She has been a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholar. She lives in Pennsylvania. (updated 9/2019)
Her AGNI poem “The Fly” was chosen for The Best New Poets 2005. Paula briefly served as poetry editor of AGNI in fall 2019.