Three Poems
Jacqueline Winter Thomas
Notes on Unfinished Poems
The unearthed fragments of this fragment.
This — a sort of quotation.
You were turned slightly toward the century.
Paul Celan was obsessed with hair.
Memories, dreams, even worlds. Face a separate sphere.
The space of Time is sound. You understand: there is no time. No sound.
Not recollections but hallucinations.
These frozen, silent figures. Over which I wept.
To end with all the signs.
The Language of Things
After Benjamin’s “Illuminations”
There is a log transformed by meaning into ash
a pre-script and a post-script
pre-fall and post-fall
a parchment and a double writing which it covers
There is a chemist and an alchemist
a name and the thing which precedes it
and, after the sentence’s flawed grammar
comes a silence unrecoverable
The funeral pyre gives way to a flame
and the flame has a life beyond
Lines after Becoming the Moon
(Jessie Benson, Beeswax & oil, 2014)
1
Everything dissolves—winter birds—the first
flight, fully formed, wings rapidly becoming. I
do not know the early sounds
of shape, nor why the laws of entropy abide—
I only know that everything once black will one day fade
2
To white,
before they disappear, wings exist
because they are not clouds.
The winter birds ricochet
the weather within them
the sky beneath—their bodies
declaring themselves
only by their context
3
Learn to track the flock’s
migration, the greater constellatory spheres
like cannulaea composing the smallest shapes:
feather, claw, vertebrae
4
Moon, and after
same as the last wing bent
against the nameless water
5
This winnowed flight
will end encaustic
6
No moon. No wing—
Contributing editor Jacqueline Winter Thomas is an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at UNC Wilmington where she teaches courses in creative writing. She writes at heteroglossia.tumblr.com.
