and stand on the balcony, listening to deer step through the crisp of dead leaves. Behind me, the dream. Your body asleep in our bed. Above me, a river of half-living, half-dying stars, Now the stony knock of a falling acorn. Now my knot of terror at losing you. Once we hiked into these hills to a ruined homestead. Moss and vine and bramble. House as rumor, a few fitted stones, a fallen beam. It was late afternoon. Red on the gold hills, sound of a river we searched to find, but it was just a breeze moving between leaves. I remember we undressed and lay down inside the hieroglyphics of shelter that meant finally nothing could hold us, your breath on my neck, our bodies binding, unbinding in sunlight.
Julia B. Levine’s many awards for her work include the Northern California Book Award in Poetry for Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU press, 2014), the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, and the Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Prize. She has been published widely in anthologies and journals, including The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and The Nation. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU Press) was published in 2021. She lives in Davis, California, where she serves as the current poet laureate.
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wow, gorgeous poem--crisp of dead leaves, stony knock of a falling acorn, house as rumor, hieroglyphics of shelter-some incredible phrases and overall so dreamlike and so immediate at the same time.