Produced by Dennis Camire

This week’s poem is by Julia Bouwsma of western Maine. Her most recent book is “Work by Bloodlight,” published by Cider Press Review.

Elegy as Dusk Rising in the Road

By Julia Bouwsma

It’s the fact of the ground. My arches braid

the arced ruts each evening, light blistering away

into droplets that fall from my eyelashes, unfurl my fingers

like breath into my sleeves. I know the way home

on this dark path as easily as I sense the crawl of legs

in the middle of a dream and reach, unthinking, to pluck

the tick’s still-feeding mouth from my calf. At the next turn

I will crest the hill into the bald eye of your tractor —

its singular, cycloptic gleaming. You bend to pound

fence posts into hardened clay one after another

as a partridge instinctively drums his need

into the ground — this palpitation of flesh to land

a wing-beat that strings me feet to chest and folds

me, here, to our night road for just one more

long drink of our separately spinning shadows.

Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu