Friday, March 27, 2026

A Feeling Right Before the Feeling


A Feeling Right Before the Feeling
    By Brenda Hillman

At sunrise the deer eat
pieces of the quiet, they eat spaces
between the quiet
    & the sounds—;
         & the numbers on the calendar
lie flat in their boxes,
      they leak through tiny holes
             in the minutes,
            evenly so, so evenly,
 an active sense, before
         the sense was made…
 
There, now, opposite to set down,
            the agreed-upon, the shape
                 of the obvious
        drawn by an earlier
           enchantment before the new
                        anxiety set in:
         the workers are safe;
 the terror stilled for an hour;
a lover’s outline, dreamed or imagined,
       before you read the one-page book
     again, what was that book,
 it had no copyright—
 
& what was before?
         a life, the dazzler, the dark,
             the singing dust, it turned
when you turned, it orpheus-knew
what you forgot when you took the bowl
        of burning time across the room—
      & if the previous is closer
   to you now, should you
look, doesn’t matter if you do,
    you carry the some of it
with it, out into it—
 
                                                for LG


Predator at the Chessboard: A Field Guide to Chess Tactics, Book II: The Pin and the Skewer; Removing the Guard; Mating Patterns

 


Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric