The fact of transparency doesn’t mean
You know what is happening. Consider
The window, which wasn’t built to know
That the closet doors are floating above
The yard or that the light they float on is
Not of this world. There are shadows
Of ominous wires slashing their way
Into the room as if to save yon damsel.
Things that obscure the glass: the city
Muck, the blinded birds, the sadness
And the double gloss of snow. It cannot
Hear the bells, or know of love, or nod
With its flat vast self to that man on
The roof, who is hard at work against
The glassy sun, fixing the invisible.
YVETTE SIEGERT is a CantoMundo poetry fellow currently reading for a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at Merton College, Oxford. Her work has appeared in the ORB, the Boston Review, Stonecutter, The New Yorker, Chelsea, Aufgabe, The White Review, and other places, and has received scholarships and fellowships from the Clarendon Fund, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She won the Van Rensselaer Poetry Prize and was runner-up in the 2019 Jon Stallworthy Prize, and her translation of Alejandra Pizarnik's late poetry, Extracting the Stone of Madness, received the 2017 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. Art by Anna Covell
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