About Trees

Kate Lindroos

For some reason I try to describe the movement of wind

and the existence of things like trees and wind, lions and thunderstorms,

but will not work to describe the same of the bathtub I tell you it is

something to be in the bathtub as a woman it is like floating

with all the women who have ever bathed in all the different

places they bathed in with similar feelings of warmth and

similar feelings of water it is how leaves must feel at the

end of themselves in the middle of a fast thunderstorm.

Night Life

The creature that knows darkness
as something not dark and therefore
knows light as something an eye
is meant to close itself to
knows light’s fading as something
beginning and the subsequent
re-arrival as signaling temporary
end is always outside at this moment
doing one part of either and everything
written has as silent audience
or subject this life aside it, though even
that which attempts to examine it directly
cannot do so completely as it is half
shadow even when there be no sun.

Kate Lindroos lives in western Massachusetts. She is the author of the chapbook The Costume of a Hunter (Factory Hollow Press). Recent poems appear in jubilat, Conduit, and Sixth Finch. Her work can be found at katelindroos.com.