There is that within—a burl, a knot, a lie— that gets in the way of forming a perfect union. But just as the onion contains itself within itself, hidden, so does each of us hide within our union. At breakfast the children tell crude jokes, and laugh, and spit seeds. This is the consequence of union. In the orchard, the orange grower speaks of scions with whispered pride and strokes the bud union. Aspens wear their wedding clothes and clack in the wind. Between ice and cloud, an uncanny union. “Behind the door you pull on the rope of longing,” wrote Nelly Sachs. How rash the desire for union and how persistent. It wears a hair shirt and a cloak of dew held together by silk thread—a taut union.
Athena Kildegaard's sixth book of poems, Prairie Midden, has just appeared from Tinderbox Editions. Her poems have found homes in Beloit Poetry Journal, december, Ecotone, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.
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