Elizabeth Robinson

Catastrophe Rhapsody

Frogs sing in the catastrophe, their

legs are ringlet-whorls of smoke

curling up from the bullseye, the what, the

charred hole.

They sing in the deluge.

They sing out at sea.

Our ears are insouciant.

Frogs, they are invisible to the eye,

but we hear them gladly,

slightly. The frogs. Them.  Who

treat our ears as a lost pond,

leaping in, sooty at the charred pits

of them, singing at the burst

tympanum.  Inaudible splash.

Invisible.

Aura Rhapsody

Steam rising from the origin of the day.

Beads of honeyed warmth like

tiny fleshy faces who melt, after all,

into sacred pronouns:

thee, none, any.

A bud shines with sweat, struggling

to open.  Ours, not thine.

Aftermath Rhapsody

After the plant had been drowned by the

rain, after the leaves turned yellow and

fell away, the blossoms clung to the water-burnt

stems, trilling.

And we who would not have our blindness

stolen from us, tunneled.

And we who aerated the soil with our warm

canister-shaped bodies, ate the roots

of dead things.  After we’d also

been drowned in the rain.  Those

who cannot see, nor be seen, speak

differently, always nocturnally, sending

up a semaphore of breath that trills

the clinging, living, last-of-them petals.

Nothing so much this, nor that, as hunger

reaching up through the dead things

to the green nerve.

Unnameable Rhapsody

Whatever it is, it must exist without designation.

Song’s work is not to delineate but to diffuse.

Close your eyes and see a streak of magenta.

Open your eyes just as its whiskers brush the back of your neck.

Open your eyes.

As you breast the hill, you are out of breath.

Says, “You will have loss, but I will rob you of grief.”

The measure of magic is that it is both true and inaccurate.

A streak of magenta across the breast.

A hill that closes its eyes.

Needle Rhapsody

I see you only when my eyes are dry and so

I close them.  I sew a hem of tiny stitches

to your outline.  To secure you in vision.

And then button eyes. Tinier stitches.

For irony.  I ply the needle with my eyes

closed.  These many pricks to the finger.

These tiny, tinier bloodstains

on the fabric of my blindness.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author, most recently,  of Excursive (Roof Books), Thirst & Surfeit (Threadsuns), and, with Susanne Dyckman, Rendered Paradise. Robinson was a 2023 winner of a Pushcart Prize and will be included in The Best American Poetry of 2024. Vulnerability Index is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2025.