To win you back, I wrote in vain
Of a place only the two of us know.
Where snow when it snowed wasn’t snow.
Where rain when it rained wasn’t rain.
That was the world.
That was the place
Where we lived—
But ordinary things,
When they fell from our hands, made noise
And stars thrown from their equipoise
Burned through their naive wings.
Dylan Carpenter’s poems appear in The Hudson Review, The Iowa Review, Lana Turner, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals. He is a lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park, and lives in Baltimore.
