Brought to rest at the hermitage
warmed with the soup-bone’s
druid tumor simmering
in the pot, I haven’t yet mastered
how to temper a broth—nor the sublime.
Water drawn from the glass
casket of a nearby stream
blackens beakers in attempts
to brew an elixir that would force a corpse
to rise up, heaven from its grave, and come
sit by the fire before catching cold.
Solitary, the swallow signals
all the harebells in the vale
open through the brittle snow.
I’ll hang one here,
in the window, to cast
its purple shadow in the dusk, quickening to a ring.
Should you be so moved
to forgive me, I’ll leave
beside my bedroom door
the rinsed-out tin can
strung to its other, and draw it closer
should I ever hear the string twitch
in the draft that shakes this old house.
–
Taylor Supplee earned his MFA from Columbia University, where he served as the first Lucie Brock-Broido Teaching Fellow. A nominee for Best New Poets 2022, his poems are forthcoming and have appeared in American Literary Review, Baltimore Review, Carve, diode, Hotel Amerika, Hunger Mountain, Image, Notre Dame Review, The Penn Review, and elsewhere. He volunteers as a poetry reader for Ploughshares and lives in Kansas City.