Temple Age

Sycamores phrasal, ashen,
strap, bi-chromatic,

this cross-hatched, argent patch of woods.
Respond with hard answers, please.

My season is upon me.
Green in there somewhere, yes,

even red, if I hash around?
Goodbye beauty, I might also say.

Depart loveliness, at last.
Passing by pallid fields,

I confess I dreamed of us.
Precarious weeks, these,

yet you never want me small.
Or parceled. Rather all.

Little Song

Who dies but once?
Evening bears the brunt

of incinerated prayer,
endless as a tale unsnared

by denouement, in closure small
as the smother from which we first bawl.

This wine, in sips, takes its measure
from whatever sober world it blurs.

Love’s an aortic nave. Its tears?
A mirror.

And sky? A shining, cross-haired dress
I’ll wear to earth’s address.

Lisa Russ Spaar is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She is the author of four books of poetry Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea Books, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008), and Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2012) and the recipient of such prestigious awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her fifth book, Orexia, will be brought out by Persea.