The Fury Fused (by Cristina J. Baptista)
“Only in darkness is thy shadow clear”
Hart Crane, The Bridge
born of gaslight and doubt:
your face, perturbed surface
of an abandoned beach.
I may be daughter of Janus and a Blue Moon,
but you have more faces than a deck of cards.
At the museum, two women
and one man were laughing at the statue—
“Look! He has a broken pen___”
Why don’t you write to me?
The absence of the formal feeling
is the nucleus, unspun
and sent into another orbit
wholly tangential to its origin.
A brooding look:
something smoldering beneath
eyebrow kindling
before reaching the bedrock of eyes.
“What talks back cannot
be the flower.”
A Zen expression.
What does that mean?
Has anyone stopped to consider
a flower may speak
in ways that do not require words?
In my hands, a rock is no colder
than when it is in yours.
(Cristina J. Baptista is a Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Associate in the GSAS Department of English.)
