Maybe All that Shakes Us is Music or Angels
(after Eduardo C. Corral)
Once, visible in the shorn field,
I poured handfuls of dirt back onto the earth –
buffalo after buffalo, falling.
You said it was just
shadows performing.
Dark haunches. Dark hooves.
Once you were my angel.
You’d crouch by the water for hours
to watch birds abandon sun-drenched sky
and dive into the cold river.
You said it was like returning
a violin to its velvet-lined case.
If the playing has been masterful,
the air still hums.
Alison Stone has published nine full-length collections, including Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2019), Caught in the Myth (NYQ Books, 2019), Dazzle (Jacar Press, 2017), Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award; as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, others. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot. www.stonepoetry.org www.stonetarot.com
Amethyst Review 