Promise Madrigal
by Lisa Russ SpaarFetal fawn of an aborted hour
albinic at the pool’s morning edge,
was gone before I could return
with spade, alarmed dog, my dread.
What’s Time that it hitches
a dropped thing into weeds’ misrule
& gives to its miscarriage wings?
ShallI read from the book
that tells me the inhuman
animal has no self, therefore
no hope of future, also a problem
for the fetus, the determined, the unmoored?
Suffering requires story. So too love’s continuum.
Its Index: You. Before. See Now. See Yet to come.
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of Satin Cash; Poems, Blue Venus: Poems, and Glass Town: Poems, for which she recieved a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. She is editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbua UP, 1999) and All That Might Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008). A collection of her essays about contemporary poetry was published by Drunken Boat Editions in 2013. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009/2010 and serves as poetry editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
