ERIC STIEFEL
Through Meadows
How must I ghost I wonder
across gravity wells of wonder—
how often I’m cursed to wander from one garden of numbers
to mosaic a meadow of meanings meaning each way of watching
the world is better than the last—
Now look disinterested upon
bleak stone streets, upon mazes of machines and gloss-black feathers,
struck from the necks of winnowing birds. Feel chill,
deep in the marrow. I ice when overwhelmed. Melancholy through
a dozen blue rooms.
One holds a painting of sails so smudged
they look like clouds. A swatch of blue in a sea of every other blue.
Now look bewildered at the baffling of things:
someone hung
a bright white sheet in the alley between two streets as if the secret
to being was to notice most things aren’t always
what they seem—
Now look upon lengths of sun-washed
sunflowers, upon time-washed marble in the floors. Try counting
the voices that tell you not to sleep: whole kingdoms
of passerine, an earthquake on the other side of the world,
a restless querying mind.
Some days I lean forward to find
strings of confetti floating through the holes of each day—
Don’t tell me I shouldn’t question the film that lingers over
me everyday. I choose to believe the light on the side of an airplane
wing is more than it was meant to be. Through dark-bright clouds
to an undercurrent of reverie. Now look:
Eric Stiefel is a Cuban-American PhD candidate at Ohio University, though he received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he also served as the 2017-2018 Junior Poetry Fellow. He was named the winner of the 2018 Sequestrum New Writer Awards and a finalist in the 2018 Penn Review Poetry Prize and the 2020 Third Coast Poetry Contest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Apple Valley Review, The Adroit Journal, The Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.