about your wings

Moral gravity makes us fall toward the heights
– Simone Weil

​white   as the tundra
    swan       magnificent—​
​into un-         tethered sky
             we      plunge
tempestuous     visions   
  fledge     into birds   
 
                    what can one do
            to ascend lower?
  
     surrounding us     
stars     bright as sorrow
    why then    this
            blood?    why 
      this    gravity
            these   talons?

---

Hush

Nothing is the force which renovates the world
​– Emily Dickinson

​​This mare who abides within. She is sculptural, fleet.
This mare of ebony mane and tail

whose brow bears a white star,
the kind a child’s hand

might make, one white streak in a body
resembling night.

This mare is the pasture’s stillness
whose eye contains the depths

of Baltic amber, gold thread of iris,
thorn, crown, bitterest tears.

The wind may gust, and here
on the high plains it does gust,

as it gusts in Damascus and Aleppo,
though I doubt there is silence there.

Why can we not remember
the feathered fall of angels,

the way the desert remembers the history of wind,
weightless, mute.

In ancient times keening gave shape to grief.
Bodies swayed and rocked.

Tell me, mare of the white star,
tail like the quill

with which God wrote His book into being,
is He still writing it now

so many children, wolf-eyed, hungry,
have ceased to speak

while poppies bloom
through the bones of the dead?

You, oh mare, can withstand wind
sharp as shards.

​Help us, I beg you,
to remember our names.

---

The North Atlantic Right Whale

In death they float, and so became known
as the “right” whales. Escalating now, their vanishing. By day
the remaining few brave ships, nets. Ahab said the eyes

define the face of man. What of a whale’s eyes?
Theirs capture the light, too. Yet these great beings know
what is visible only within the dark, surfaces and depths. Today
​
the right whales numbers are three hundred. When their eyes
close, two portals remain open. How we see, we know.
But how little, how very little do we know.

Jacqueline Kolosov is a poet and prose writer whose awards include an NEA Fellowship. Her book-length words include Memory of Blue (Salmon Poetry) and A Sweet Disorder (Hyperion/Disney), among others. She has coedited three anthologies of contemporary writing, most recently Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Investigation of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Originally from Chicago, she now lives and works in the Texas Panhandle along with her dogs and horses.