Evidence
To ask who built the machinery
of the world implies machinery.
Pattern isn’t the same as technique,
although, rubbing my eyes, I can’t
be clear about the distinction.
Let’s start again. I’m lucky
we walk up the wooden staircase
together every night, pausing
at the small window to look out
over the frostbitten yard,
the streetlight pinging in the cold,
the empty school parking lot.
The blankness is a comfort, as is
your hand against my back
as you nudge me toward our room
under the ribs of the pitch-dark house.
There’s the nothing on either side
of us. That’s something.
of the world implies machinery.
Pattern isn’t the same as technique,
although, rubbing my eyes, I can’t
be clear about the distinction.
Let’s start again. I’m lucky
we walk up the wooden staircase
together every night, pausing
at the small window to look out
over the frostbitten yard,
the streetlight pinging in the cold,
the empty school parking lot.
The blankness is a comfort, as is
your hand against my back
as you nudge me toward our room
under the ribs of the pitch-dark house.
There’s the nothing on either side
of us. That’s something.
Ann Hudson's first book, The Armillary Sphere, was published by Ohio University Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Orion, Crab Orchard Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Art: Prism House, acrylic on birch panel, 2021 by Kelly Cressio-Moeller.