Rhythm of a Swing
He swings stop-motion like Nude
Descending a Staircase
like street lights blazing comet
tails in a car window
like the flat-topped mesa's burnish
in the desert,
or soldered silver bending into
shape, like a woman
in the Laundromat threading a
needle, staring off
like a turquoise door standing
against evil spirits
an empty fortune cookie on a mica
table
like the eighth day of the ninth
month, waiting
like Stieglitz resting his camera
before the last shot,
and a mother's call from the
window, come see the fawn,
or a pinion wood weighed with snow,
and reams of office paper
falling from the sky, like the
spinning wheel of a potter,
and the potter's hands and the
final vase,
and the glazing over its ceramic
body,
like the flat-topped mesa
burnishing the relentless sun,
the desert like a woman, the pinion
wood growing
in a place unseen, sun glazing over
its body, its branches,
waiting, as on the tenth day of the
ninth month,
the turquoise door like the
potter's wheel, solid,
like the bat as the shutter opens on the instant, on the last shot.
— Allison Contey