by Rachel Kaufman
After the fields, silence weighs in its waiting
for revelation. A drink in the cool stars to
learn these constellations? It will make you
drowsy and seeing. Mark these grids with
dashes and circles, imitations of
line’s melody as it dictates itself
to us, like how we learn to farm in long
straight lines, to burn seeds until rebirth, to
make cities so they fit like hand-sketched
shapes in purple crayon outlines wide enough
to paint the desert bruised. Near there, by
patchwork tin sheds built over sand is a blue
house where the cattle buck at shored moon,
its sorrowing eyes closing as cool glass settles
on wet earth’s fright.
Rachel Kaufman’s poetry has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Western Humanities Review, Carve Magazine, The Raw Art Review, and elsewhere. She received a BA in English & History from Yale University and is a PhD student in Latin American & Jewish History at UCLA.