By Rose DeMaris
A suddenness of someone wild clarifies the long opacity
when I go out to latch the gate, feel a disturbance
of grass, hear one flute’s silver whistling in the roots
of our staggered breaths. I don’t know who it is
until, in a beam of the same blue supermoon under which
I prayed last night to be restitched into infinity, I can
see, glowing like a votive candle of the sort I’ve paid
a dollar to light in carved and gilded naves, the raised
white tail of a deer.
I adore the heart inside this world! Are my tears hers?
Between us, just a blue-sewn seam? A tireless
artist of longing, she is the secret sap of life, hidden
sequin in the fissures of ruin who persists in birthing. Love
what I have made. Why are we not kneeling, kissing
hoofprints holding rippling mirrored moons, worshipping,
weeping at the wonder? In the thicket where I wander:
a statue, chipped and white. Red rosaries of bitter-berries
hover all around her.
Rose DeMaris’s poetry appears in Image, New England Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She received Orison Books’ Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry in 2022 and the 2024 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, and she was a Best New Poets nominee in 2023. She holds advanced degrees in English and Native American Studies as well as an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow. She lives, writes, and wanders in Montana.
