Fooling Around
The leveling of luck is gamble, is
gaming, is the etching of foolery,
a line reaching out to a new world
as his hand reached out in the dark car
to tug at her blouse while she squirmed.
Is the real “what we cannot look away from”?
Or is it the unconsciousness of our
astonishment? The intensity of time?
The “facts” reverberate and the finite
falls silent but even the silence is noisy –
hollow slough of wind through trees
and the rattle of faraway traffic . . . .
Above the car the sky was a field
sprinkled with fireflies, and the edge
of the world appeared near the windows
like a ruin moving toward a memory,
the leveling of luck, the gamble.
Mary
Crow teaches at Colorado State University in the Creative Writing program and serves as Poet Laureate of
Colorado. Her poems have recently been accepted or published by Prairie
Schooner, Hotel Amerika, Field, Ecopoetics, Verse, Main Street Rag, and Margie.
She is currently circulating a book of poems titled Isleward.