Jennifer Atkinson
Night Sea
The tideline
is written
in water in salt
in sand
what else
but over
and over
revising
unknowns
a rhythm
of unbegun
motion return
and return
an authorless
gesture
the ground is un-
boundedness gone
over in blue
in blue
drawn over
gold leaf
the power of
squares
like identical
rhymes
obscured in sameness
repetition
is self-
effacement
a widening
outward as the sea’s
unstillable
motion stills
Sufficing
The fragrance of wind across snow
and the consequent windless
space of mind
combed mohair
(that luster)
a cicada’s scaled wing
the sphagnum light
of an April woods
the dust
moonlight leaves or touching
the green
luna moth on the screen door
inform her de-nouned line
Its conviction goes without her
saying
which is to say
Let and There is
“Mountains and Sea”
The broad contours of ocean,
mountain, level shore,
and the room, a flat expanse
opaque as sky on the floor,
move in balance.
Place remembered as motion
—lift, turn, rest—
a muscle memory of days
in that place seeing.
The landscapes were in my arms as I did it.
Linseed and pine air—
it’s an early light—
haloes of blur
appear unplanned for.
Rose quartz sands
shift; gust-thinned fog,
Atlantic greens and blues,
salt- and floodtide-scoured.
Some parts are visible,
some parts not,
the whole 360
infolded, recalled to form,
a performance of color, collisions
rehearsed across
the space until it’s natural—
Jennifer Atkinson is the author of five poetry collections. The most recent one, The Thinking Eye, was published by Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions in 2016. These poems are from a recently completed ms. titled A Gray Realm the Ocean. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at George Mason University.