January 22, 2025

Six Poems

Sandra Meek

Wilson Bentley, Photograph of Frost, 1910. The Metropolitan Museum.

Acquiescent Moon (in Auieo)

Not Saturn’s pursing rings
chirring the end
to any fruiting, the orchard’s bluff itself
no frost’s causing—still, the orbs
brown, worm, fall. Pawn
and Psalm, Fray’s
Unfurling, Blistered Empress
of Almanacs—such
is night. Eye of Opal
skull-sculling the wheeled
beyond, auspice decoy’s avatar, thrall
that star’s flung bright
inciting vespers of wolf-howls and surf’s
push-pull tiding the crescendo
of all alarms’ urgings
dismissed: error’s an army crunching ice-
fettered snow, an assault
dumb silence let go, always, past.
Dawn’s what dusks
guile flown as augur’s
nullifying light which begets
both hold and hull in these
crossroads’ crux. Fugitived
not to mask, but shield; not
to lack, but wield.


Horror Vacui (in Auieo, reversed)

(W)here be serpents be need
                 not to know no (d)art’s sufficient
                     to tranquilize (t)error.
      What mappa mundis inked (t)here:

excess. So not to launch
night’s mind-field, the beyond-
            wor(l)d’s world’s trod
to (l)anguishment, behemoth, to blank,
     and b(l)ank, accruing
                    precedents—co(m)mas
     a bruting, then, never not

a burnishing: ciphers
rendered beetled demons
    and crucifi(x)es to pray us
                   isn’t (t)hem onto that vacuum mine
    effected, perfected there.
                  Self’s echo. Lost caus-
tic fiefdom. What usufruct’s bluff

misdeeded to: all that business
of broadcast past(ur)ing wilderness
   (w)here the decoy—colossal
                  untruth, Truth—
lies now, last guidepost

to vanquishment.


Schwa, v. (in Auieo)

As, sans ă’s brass
tacks and jazz hand

stands, sans ā’s

bass paydays, jays’ May-
day angst; as, unlush

lungfuls hung hum

-drum: cumulus chuffs Ur-blur-
ring in ill-lit

limning. This “schism-

bridging”—cliticizing.
This splicing: middling.

Meter metes the kneed

neck, bottom born
or thrown—not lost,

nor forlorn. No

knoll’s solo shot,
from control’s contort

consort broods:

from common lot, bond,
chords on hold

so long—

from tomorrow’s woodwork,
throngs.


Anthropocenic Wish (in Auieo, reversed)

Turn dusk’s
atmospheric skin
strung
as tropospheric
urn back
as ash
as halo
of smoke
the first
struck
match—no
not yet
lit.


Centrifugal Forced (in Auieo, reversed)

Wind-thrust, what holds

domestic in unfurl
what a flag

phantoms:
border. Hem. Skin

thick with push

away. Who so enters,
decentered

with shun, surplus
and foreign,

lingua franca of them

isn’t us—push-
pull that tolls bell-

icistic with if’s
rust: that staccato

of lockboxes
ticking

shut.


Afghan, v.

As, at an art gala
all backslaps and back-

stabs, a man pans
as handcraft, damns as

gal-/vamp-/grandma-
art, as all prams/

mascara/shawls,
yarn art’s play*

and play-acts fawn
at a man’s canvas

(scamp that attracts
a bad-ass swan’s

attack) a mass’s all
a gaga at; days, all brass

balls and glass
jaw—at dark, all angst

and bawl; apart, back
at a flat, at a bland

canvas-stack that all
say flaw, all say

hasn’t, hadn’t,
can’t, what that man

clasps calls back
art’s last thrall—at day

camp, as a lad, a lanyard
a rapt Mama’d call

grand: as, what’s lap-
drawn, balms; as, what wraps

(yarn all dawn rays,
mandalas, star-sprays) ah—

warms.

* T. H. MacAdam (Canada/Japan)

Sandra Meek has published six books of poems, including Still (Persea), named a “New & Noteworthy Poetry Book” by the New York Times Book Review. Other titles include An Ecology of Elsewhere, Road Scatter (both Persea), and Biogeography (Tupelo), winner of the Dorset Prize , as well as an edited anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark), awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. Recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, three Georgia Author of the Year awards, and two Peace Corps Writers awards, she is poetry editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College.

(view contributions by Sandra Meek)