ERIC PANKEY

CHIMNEY GROWING OUT OF RUBBLE

In a clearing one longs
For the forest’s depths,
The substance of amnesia,
Subdued blue hues,

But finds instead a past—
A landscape salvaged
From memory’s wreckage,
An ambivalence called home:

An empty stone foundation
Tilting inward. The river
Between freezes and thaws.
Surface ice shatters and cants,

Freezes once again to offer
A jagged passage across.


THE LINE STARTS HERE

The path, strewn with mulberries, ends at the sky, a gray-tinted cornflower blue. Night seeps in at the edges like water filling a scuttled boat. There is nothing I want to set straight. The moon, a spirit level’s bubble, shimmies a little off-center.

 

A HEAP OF UNROLLED BANDAGES UPON THE FLOOR

The invisible man courts anonymity. He has grown tired of the fraught drama of sleight of hand, tired of the shadow labyrinth of set down by the window’s elaborate lead-work. To ward off harm, he cloaks the plaster cast interior of the small closet in a black felt skin. The closet’s cramped dark, as he walks around it, embodied now as a positive space, seems a mansion.



ERIC PANKEY is the author of many collections of poems, most recently Augury (Milkweed Editions, 2017). He is the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University.