Rose Lucas
Barn doors are latched against the snow
and a slash of red roof slants across winter’s pale, oncoming frame:
when a grouse,
flecked and surprisingly elegant
sails low through the yard, hitting
doors with crunch of bone,
the rupturing sac –
so that an angularity of feathers slides
slow toward the still exposed gravel of the drive,
trailing bloodied tracks to answer
gravity’s dark urgings,
the density of this clotted earth;
even as the honeyed light of lamps
springs up in human windows –
the silken weave of feather and warm body,
the airiness of skeleton, acuity of eye,
flight’s bold trajectory –
all fall askew,
broken and
cooling already as evening
floods the wide and darkening fields of death’s wilderness –
its blackening grasses,
its blank interruption.
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet, critic and academic. Her collection of poems, Even in the Dark, was published by University of West Australia Press, July 2013. She is currently teaching Poetry and Poetics at Victoria University.
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