Cleaving Light – a poem by Kathryn Knight Sonntag

Cleaving Light 
 
sun blinks above a band of dove-grey 
cloud. descending to an early horizon, she turns 
                          her strange manifesting on me. 
 
streams glint through the V of maple boughs; 
leaves flicker at a value approaching zero. 
                          I am in her beam,
 
angled for the downcast eyes 
of Mary, for Bryn Celli Ddu at solstice,
                          for the canyon growing deep 
 
and marked behind me—held 
by what I cannot grasp. frequencies dance my eyes
                          —I am what she makes—real/
 
eluding, the hawk now            drifting.
her tilt to wane skimming my brow, 
                          my muttered stay, as sky fills up with night.

Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the author of the poetry collection The Tree at the Center (BCC Press, 2019). She has recent and forthcoming poems in Psaltery & Lyre, Abstract Magazine, The Curator, and the anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose (Torrey House Press, 2021). She works as a landscape architect in Salt Lake City, Utah. www.kathrynknightsonntag.com