Radha Marcum The Poets

A low summer sun smudges darkness under the piñons and junipers. Though the piñons produced few nuts this year, the jays still pass from clump to clump at dusk hunting the chestnut-black teardrops. Tracing the dunes’ dry embrace, you think the hills resemble Modigliani’s sketch of Akhmatova reclining. The sunset teases and unsettles. Chamisa sways, the downdraft’s consort. Tomorrow, on instinct, the jays will go on beseeching dry cones for seeds, like poets recollecting words carried in full throats, then hidden— Akhmatova’s ellipses, her breath paused at line’s end. (The inner emigré, she burned every scrap of Requiem, burned ink-marks cached in notebooks.) Whatever dark clusters the birds bury now, next April they will fail to find all of them, the slow-growing piñon forest predicated on their forgetfulness.