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.
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.
