A Clear Field With Oxen Plowing the Constellated Heavens
After wrestling with their terrestrial captivity,
caterpillars unfurl their wings
from chrysalis penitentiaries, find religion
in a newfound flightism,
this up-in-the-airism a holy space separating
of flight from what had been
off light. This soaring-through-the-heavensism
technicolors their wings
as if they’d been held in the breathless gloom
of 10,000 locked-up cellars
& now they wing-flap heavy/light, heavylight.
It’s exhausting to dream,
always awakening in the same place, my son
whispers, observing how
they’re the dazzling sun in a coalmine’s belly,
as we skip past a pit bull
taking his man for a walk: The dog speaks
of a godless eternity,
his leash-man barking in reply, or in defiance.
Light’s drained of mass, elms
sticking their seeking branches upon starlings,
an elderly man warning us
metamorphosis changes you, his spotted skin
picked apart by bone
from the inside out, flowerbeds disassembled
by a splash of snow:
He awoke, determined to be someone else,
but thought better of it.
Frenzied moths twirl, bright-winged dervishes
flapping prayers beneath
the moon’s luminescence, the sky no longer
a clear field with oxen
plowing the constellated heavens. Now,
a satellite-laden freeway
flashes its utility, & a stand of evergreens
clusters together, shivering
like gigantic pipe-cleaners, my son pointing up
at a full moon painting
its memory of sunlight, a glowing afterthought,
as if it knew everything.
*
Jonathan Greenhause’s first poetry collection, Cupping Our Palms (Meadowlark Press, 2022), was the winner of the 2022 Birdy Poetry Prize, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Lake Effect, Poetry Wales, and Saranac Review. He lives in Jersey City with his wife and two children.