Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

A Travel of Romance  
Gary L. McDowell

after Eric Fischl

Scene IV

A sheet-ghost, the kind that shutters even when
you grab it round the neck.  Ghosts are certain.

She’s folding laundry or unfolding laundry.
She’s laundering.  Or she lost a necklace, an earring

in the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed.
My love, bent over, not broken, but hinged maybe.

All the fragments in the world don’t add up to a whole.
I want to reach in to the painting, this time, just this time,

and tell her: strike a flint against my face and the stubble
will beget a spark, and fire, once again, will be born from boredom.

 

Gary L. McDowell is the author of American Amen, which won the 2009 Orphic Prize for Poetry, and of two chapbooks, They Speak of Fruit (Cooper Dillon, 2009) and The Blueprint (Pudding House, 2005).  He is the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010). He lives in Portage, MI with his wife and young son, Auden.