Chinoiserie

Karen Rigby

Selected for the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Paul Hoover

 

A sample poem from the book

 

In the Lizard-Dark, No Fire in the Orchard

In the lizard-dark, no fire in the orchard.
No moonlight. Nothing but a blue hoop turned
along the horizon, the street

a white pastoral
framed in the after-image.

Everything remains: decanters pouring
no wine. The wedding mantled in blue.
The grim pandemic

painted in poison chromatics.
If I think of music,
                                        it’s not the snow
blown through the artist’s skull, nor bergamot
crushed in its mortar. Not the slap

of double-dutch. Children’s marble games.
Nights the mariners return—
hands carved
                              against the carapace.
It is the Flemish harbor mantled
around us. Panic of blood-rise, village of blue.

 

 

© 2012 Karen Rigby