Andrew Sargus Klein
SELF PORTRAIT AS THE MOON, THE HEADLIGHT’S DREAM
Early January escapes the solstice—bruised light hangs on a little longer before the garment of night. The headlight dreams herself as the moon, the flush heart of the inverted sea, where she folds herself into a sliver of a sequin: “what is gone from me is always returning; water breathes with me inviolate and maternal.” This is where the dream ends.
Stillness is a mirage on the human scale. Time is violence, the face of the world relearning itself.
On the side of a highway a car sits forgotten and dark. Colonies of fireflies repopulate its empty headlight, waiting for high summer and its blink of midnight that will find the forgotten car with the slow-glowing eye, pulling it from the shoulder up along a certain slant of moonlight into the night, where the headlight can be her own myth, the unblinking ghost along the spine of the sky.
Stillness is a mirage on the human scale. Time is violence, the face of the world relearning itself.
On the side of a highway a car sits forgotten and dark. Colonies of fireflies repopulate its empty headlight, waiting for high summer and its blink of midnight that will find the forgotten car with the slow-glowing eye, pulling it from the shoulder up along a certain slant of moonlight into the night, where the headlight can be her own myth, the unblinking ghost along the spine of the sky.
SELF PORTRAIT
as the treeline, the respiring threshold
the same
stay
the same air
as the sky, the release
blue ink
and uneven
water
as myself, the landscape’s walking heart
the sediment that bleeds
as the river, the conviction
where
am I finest
as the valley, the open grave
light
you fall into me
gathering the voice that breaks
as the watershed, the afterthought
Andrew Sargus Klein lives and works and loves in Baltimore. He is a contributing editor at Wildness and the author of the poetry chapbook Bluemore (Furniture Press Books, 2014). His work has been published by The Offing, Everyday Genius, Fruita Pulp, Harlequin Creature, and others.