“Ars Poetica” by Patty Paine

205 Replies

The dark beyond the window is
not the same as the dark inside

a piano, a dark you can’t know,
just as your body, sitting there

beside the piano, is an enclosure
with its own unknowable dark.

This is metaphor
for nothing. Just as a bird is not

a conceit, no matter how hard we want
to feel wings open

across our backs, taste flight
on our tongues. Even in death

a bird is not a blade that cuts
to the quick of our loss, it’s just

a splayed thing, something to be
stepped around, for decomposition to have

its efficient way, I don’t mean
to be cynical, but there are days

when language is heavy
furniture you push around

a house made of nothing
but hallways. I’m not feeling

sorry for myself, if that’s what
you’re thinking. I just want

you to be careful, because
sometimes a poem can lie.

It can make you think darkness
is a curtain that can be swept

back to reveal a sky gilded in light,
where wing beats fall

into a rhythm of hope, hope, hope.

-Patty Paine,
The Sounding Machine, 2012 © Accents Publishing

Patty PainePatty Paine is the author of Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, The Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and many other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is assistant director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

205 thoughts on ““Ars Poetica” by Patty Paine”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *