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Published: Wed Apr 15 2009
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
Morandi

Stand here. Now listen to
the light. For what is
material can be felt first
as sound. Or
as six or eight
vases, jars, dishes.
White, bone, ivory, brown
on a table with margins.
Or then as light.
Then the rare permission
of blue.
A line-up, including the generic
exiting a thin envelope
of space. It accumulates.
Regroups as if rethought
in the forum of time
as four or six vases
that cast shadows.
A fulcrum
using light as force
that might move us
to an interior’s gravity.
The small music
left from a sky once on fire.
As if time in columns has been
collared here.

See what's inside AGNI 69

Robert Bense’s book of poems, Readings in Ordinary Time, was published in 2007 by The Backwaters Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Salmagundi, AGNI, and The New Republic, among many other magazines. (updated 7/2009)

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