[Skip Navigation]

Poetry Archives

A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

Latitude

Jocelyn Emerson

for Lara Trubowitz

It’s a kind of rapture.
Light held

in a cloud
of atoms colder

than the spaces
between stars.

*

What season will the first
minutes after

resemble?
Will all the illusions graft

back on?  All the nights
and days, insatiable?

(the raft of voices)
Orpheus

and his song.

*

And spring’s shaven
black ocean loosens

memory’s remote
isotropic hunger

in sudden
downdraft

(a March storm
in cold crossing)

as the last of winter’s
incursions

breach and lash
at the vertical—

until summer’s
enormous magnetic

fields cull and crest
in alternate, white sails—
© 2002 Jocelyn Emerson. All rights reserved.
From Denver Quarterly 37: 1, Spring, 2002 | Denver Quarterly, 2002
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Add Keyword Tags

Separate each tag with a space. You may add as many tags as you'd like to each poem.

What are tags?
Tags, sometimes called “folksonomies,” are words that describe or categorize a poem, like “20th century modernism” or “Italian sonnet”. Tags can help you find poems that have something in common, based on how other people classify them.

More Info

This site will work and look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any Internet device.