Beverly Voigt's Poetry Pages

That Autumn in Pennsylvania     Little has given me so much joy as to walk quietly into that field of horses    early each Saturday, the smell of earth and animal  sweet and musky, to look for the reddish    freckled one called Strawberry. To approach her  as I would a loved one sleeping. I’d let her    notice me, run my hand along the length  of her neck, speak low and sing-song    of the morning’s innocence. Of her warmth.  I could be tethered to this earth forever, forgetting    what our bodies lose every moment to the open  air. Our exhalations rising in clouds, disappearing    into the fields of the sky. Here is the scent  and warmth of uneven ground. And breath enough    for large and small breathing bodies. Taking  her reins I start walking. Her ponderous hooves lift    and follow. When her head swings down  for a scratch across my wool sweater, I feel...

For the Attenuated Praise, my dear one. Let us disappear into praising. Nothing belongs to us. —Rilke, from “Elegy for Marina”     I seem attenuated, my friend the physicist tells me. I think I know what he means. I am   stretched thin by grief, the taut wire of my life grown weak. I wear it on my face, show it   in my crawl through the day, nights populated with dreams of the missing. He says it   as though he fears me. But I am not a graven image, a token of anguish to be looked on.    We are all living in extremis, attached, tensile, to this wire. Swifts caught in the air above   the tipu trees, starlings wound around a belfry as on a guide rope. We are all in thrall   to the earth—a line of seagulls, lit by the sunset, forming a ladder to the sea. We are held   together by what has sliced us open. The tide comes to shore and rushes back out to meet   itself. Here is your grief, on my face. My gaping heart knowing yours. —From So...

Beverly reading from her book, Song of the Overcast , now available at Finishing Line Press :

Song of the Overcast  on TikTok Finishing Line Press on TikTok