The Novitiate
I know my bare shoulders darken by day.
That deer hide in heat.
And it is the creek pooling under a willow
that reminds me the soul loves the unsayable,
while the self has named these orange petals, Starfire.
I stand on shore yanking their stalks loose
like a rope that is breaking. Must be broken.
This is the only world I have ever loved.
But it is a child’s game to believe in enough.
To remember suddenly my dream last night
of rising up, flying out across grasslands,
a trio of mustangs racing far below.
Years now, I’ve studied the good book,
but found nothing except the truth
of my body as it stands beside this brook,
clutching a torch of flowers, as if to signal here
to those three wild horses stepping through
as deer. Such slender legs, thin as foals.
Dark lips deep in berries,
muzzles needled in between the thorns.
That deer hide in heat.
And it is the creek pooling under a willow
that reminds me the soul loves the unsayable,
while the self has named these orange petals, Starfire.
I stand on shore yanking their stalks loose
like a rope that is breaking. Must be broken.
This is the only world I have ever loved.
But it is a child’s game to believe in enough.
To remember suddenly my dream last night
of rising up, flying out across grasslands,
a trio of mustangs racing far below.
Years now, I’ve studied the good book,
but found nothing except the truth
of my body as it stands beside this brook,
clutching a torch of flowers, as if to signal here
to those three wild horses stepping through
as deer. Such slender legs, thin as foals.
Dark lips deep in berries,
muzzles needled in between the thorns.
Julia B. Levine’s awards for her work include the Northern California Book Award for Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU press, 2014), and first prizes in the 2019 Bellevue Literary Review, 2019 Public Poetry Awards, and 2018 Tiferet Poetry Prize. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms, will be published in 2021 from LSU press.
Art: Molly Dunham