By Rose DeMaris
or all the birds who vanish from the sky (in fifty years alone, one
in four have gone), but listen with attention to what remains of
song. Pour the citrus colors of the Marianne white-eye
into a cut-glass tumbler: juice of lemon, pulp of lime. Drink it
slowly. Taste what’s here: all facets of creation make one broken
chandelier. Add the oil of a dimpled rind torn open in
the sun, and rock sugar for a ring of snowflake white around
your sight.
Be brave enough to see, to look deep down into matter.
Risk being dazzled to near-death by the intensity of light.
Touch, crystallize, tend to the prisms still at hand:
tiger, tiger,
oak,
you, me—all
are
Marianne.
Rose DeMaris is a poet and teacher. Her poetry appears in New England Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image Journal, Narrative, and elsewhere. A recipient of the 2023 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award and Orison Books’ 2022 Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry, she holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She lives in Los Angeles.
