Tag Archives: in memory

By Death

By Death
By Pattiann Rogers

In that moment she became two, one sitting
among the red flags of the blackbirds
in the reeds, the other standing fixed
like a poplar in a fence of poplars.

In the next second, there were four
of her, one watching evening from the sill
beside the bed, another laced through the night-
spaces between the fireflies.

In a further splitting, she was eight,
and in the next sixteen, one blue
by paper lantern, one amethyst by evening
smoke, one ringed like ice by a winter
moon, one ringed like a lily pond by rain,
one marked by murder, one veined
by acquittal.

And there were thirty-two of her then
and again sixty-four, and she was simultaneously
over a plain of summer cress and under
a reef of evening coral, within a knob
of shyster thistle, within a bud of thresher
shark, sailing by roots of bony fish,
soaring by fins tamarack and phlox.

With the next turning she became
a hundred and twenty-eight of himself, groomed
the horse of Orion, dwelled in the light-remnant
of Vela.  She was wind through the scaffold
of pity, a nesting owl among the eaves of praise.
Then two hundred fifty-six– she was stone as well,
and zephyr, then legion, then too various
to be reckoned, too pervasive to be noticed,
too specific to be named.

from Firekeeper: Selected Poems