Ice Night
Edward DeSilva
oil on canvas
Portugal, 1985
I wasn’t tall enough for the chair, the neck and the pocket, where the burrow was. Light alighted like hummingbird shoes, but I’m still cinnamon and sunrise, not yet brutally folded.
The wood goes one direction, and when cut, the water goes the other, the gesture of an animal’s hand that says, Pastoral, says, Comfortable quicksand.
It’s ice night and folded crisp, thin enough to drop humble, raise the spine to my delicate skull.
The problem is your body, listening to itself. The problem is my body, listening to itself listening.
The light is not inside the light bulb. Instead, a tissue of dedications.
I mean success is fluid. Success avoids boxes.
I mean arrange this so the other love falls out.
Rich Ives has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Thin Air Creative Nonfiction Award. His books include Light from a Small Brown Bird (Bitter Oleander Press--poetry), Sharpen (The Newer York—fiction chapbook), The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books—stories), Old Man Walking Home After Dark (Cyberwit--poetry), Dubious Inquiries into Magnificent Inadequacies (Cyberwit--poetry), A Servant’s Map of the Body (Cyberwit—stories), Incomprehensibly Well-adjusted Missing Persons of Interest (Cyberwit—stories), and Tunneling to the Moon (Silenced Press--stories).