Tuesday poem #562 : Catherine Rockwood : Balm and simile

 

 

 

Increasingly I like flowers half-spent and sprawling

like the lanky arm of blue “Claire Grace” I put

in a clear plain vase of water on the patio table

where it bucked with the breeze, unwatering itself.

I watched as that branch yanked out of salvation

collected spider-silk in its drying claws

and turned from right to left then back again

ticking like a skein winder in revolt

that makes or unmakes, delightedly, its own time.

 

 

 

Catherine Rockwood’s poetry chapbooks, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion, & And We Are Far From Shore: Poems For Our Flag Means Death, are available from the Ethel Zine Press. Poems in or forthcoming in Black Lily Zine, Bad Lilies, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and many other publications not named after flowers. She/they is/are currently wrangling a full-length manuscript.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan