Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Winter Inventory  
Adam Day

I look out at the night’s river-water
sliding violently over one another,

speaking a language remembered
from another of earth’s ages, and almost

understand that speech as human, some
body of absence struggling with itself

under bridge lights. And remember
a winter spent driving a heatless car

with a patchwork quilt thrown over my legs
until more than the ghost of warmth existed

and I was alone on a country road under
a nothing sky with the stubbled fields

and the telephone poles flashing past
and the sense that if I closed my eyes

I might remain sitting, speeding along,
no car, and soon no road, and perhaps

the trees evaporate and the telephone polls
sink deep into hard earth and nothing

then but myself, and a river far off, and the name
of someone, and still no better understanding.

 

Adam Day is the recipient of a 2010 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha. He is also the recipient of a 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, BOMB, APR, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, Forklift: Ohio, AGNI, The Iowa Review, and Best New Poets 2008. He coordinates the Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, is writer-in-residence at Earlham College, and edits the literary journal, Catch Up.