On Ice

By NATHANIEL PERRY 

 

The dogwood makes a second

skin of winter rain.

The form’s the thing, the sky

is saying as it drains

 

our language of descriptors:

crystalline? No, not glassy

either, or prismatic

or delicate or flashy

 

(not showing off or making

a beacon of the day’s

small sun) or fragile, or mine,

or ours. There are only the ways

 

it mimics what it itself

can’t say, but re-covers instead

in clarity—the way

the world gets locked in our heads.

 

[Purchase Issue 13 here]

Nathaniel Perry is the author of Nine Acres, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. He is the editor of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review and lives with his family in rural Southside Virginia.

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On Ice

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