The Fiddleback

Back to top The sound of walking through snow:
cascade envelopes. I am whitening
with the news, hair departing

for the body’s bright reduction—
because of shadows, swallows
from the eaves are twice,

and the sun just half a face,
its egg imbalanced, its ear
gone hazy with the flour in the air.

Let’s use what’s left: pistachio shells
make wooden bulbs for fingers,
twig profusions of millet

when I sneeze. Even days go flat
beneath the rolling pin,
the long while went since

when did it snow? The rabbit tracks
in gray spirals from the garage
are the surviving shapes of habit.

I cook to put a little landscape on the table.
Wind-chimes still a bearded man
upon the porch. Before I opened the door,

meringue. And after: shrinking
in the noisy wind. Come in

I said to him, and eat. 
Our house is a polyp of heat
in a parchment of ice.



----------
Alec Hershman lives in St. Louis, MO where he teaches at Florissant Valley Community College and at the Center for Humanities at Washington University. Other poems can be found in recent issues of Harpur Palate, Salamander, DIAGRAM, and Transom. He is currently poetry editor for The White Whale Review.

 

Volume 1, Issue 7 Back to top