Want by Katrina Roberts

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 28, 2015   Want   Katrina Roberts

A man walks into a  museum in Paris, the Museum of Natural History, to saw   a tusk off an elephant- skeleton centuries-older than   he’ll ever be, becoming   in those early morning hours   part of a derelict and inglorious human history,   while swallows darn the air in loops, their glinting wings   an origami of hushed folds   only glimpsed by one vigilant  girl, framed as she is within a pane of glass, the door of her heart opening onto a filigreed balcony that keeps her   suspended, an unlikely wish   about someone not coming back. A man walks. A man walks in to a bar. “Whaddya   want?” Dusty continent of desire. Majesty left as ragged meat in heaps for hyenas   “laughing” in heat. Who can look away? A man sets rough elbows heavy on the lip   of zinc, thumbs each cheekbone so his pointers steeple to catch his brow, shuts eyes, heaves a sigh   then slumps to rest an unshaven cheek against the cool, unquestioning bar, as though to sink   into what’s most elemental. What’s “natural” about any man making his way alone   through empty Left Bank streets carrying not a lovely burnished box of watercolor paints in uniform   lozenge-cakes but a chainsaw?  The wheeling sky sees all while sleepers sleep, still   dreaming in languages long lost when day breaks. The pinking sky sees all, but rarely speaks   though someone more Romantic might say it weeps. And the sleepless girl, orphaned by light, the bright   tusk of her hopes. The joke no joke, no punch- line, but a gut-punch in plain sight.            Copyright © 2015 by Katrina Roberts. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “The growing list of human-caused extinctions weighs heavily in my thinking. Also, the span of any one of our lives–eyelash thin, a cosmic parenthesis, really…and yet, such insistence on divisiveness, on wall-making. Attentiveness might let us move from fact into narrative; of course, enacted desires have consequences. What are our consolations?” —Katrina Roberts   Katrina Roberts is the author of Underdog (University of Washington Press, 2011). She teaches at Whitman College and lives in Walla Walla, Washington. Most Recent Book by Roberts   Underdog (University of Washington Press, 2011) "Horse Latitudes" by Jo Sarzotti "Driven by a Strange Desire" by Mónica de la Torre "A Song On the End of the World" by Czeslaw Milosz Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038