Poem in Which the Season Turns on Its Hinge

J.L. Conrad

Mist cloaks the window at night. Deertracks
straddle the fencelines and keep on moving. We try
to remake ourselves into people who no longer
carry watches or phones. Who heed messages left
on lampposts, on bus station walls. Who know better
than to venture outside. I can’t bear the way
everything holds still between two desires. Nothing
gates off the past from the future and, because of this, we traffic
in gestures instead of words. I can make neither heads nor tails
sprout from the prototypes. Who, unliving, continue
to stare from the borders of the room, the region beyond
the lamplight. The furniture, too, stands at attention.
I box things up only to find them again later. It’s true
the signs have been there all along. Do you want me
to make something of them? Assemble the pieces and show
the image lurking on the other side? The world
transmogrified. Otherwise there’s not much to do
but stock up on essentials: bread, milk, coffee.

J. L. Conrad is the author of the full-length poetry collection A Cartography of Birds (Louisiana State University Press, 2002) and the chapbooks Not If but When (Salt Hill, 2016) and Species of Light (Bellywater Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Jellyfish, Salamander, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Laurel Review, among others. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.