Lia Purpura

Its nature is ruthless, nothing as simple as loss being ruinous, those undeniable rainbows of oil, shock of bright sulphurous puddles (in goldfinch, in lemon) and now what, if that beauty's terrible plumage makes you keep looking and disturbs your despair.

No one home. Snow packing the morning in. Much white nothing filling up. A V of birds pulling the silence until some dog across the street barks, and breaks what I call my peace. What a luxury annoyance is. It bites off and keeps just enough of what I think I want to be endless.

A clear choice is so sweet. Not reluctance but real resistance. Joy-to-bursting, or none. Grief, not gradations. Someone essential and someone not. A good, dark strike-through versus weighing everything at the end of each day. Look, a cat killed a cardinal on an emerald lawn. For so many reasons it shouldn't have been beautiful. But that's also the kind of book I like best.

In the beginning, in the list of begats, one begat got forgot: work begets work (one poem bears the next). In other words, once there was air, a bird could be got. Not taken. Not kept. But conjured up.