by Charles Hensler
And then you stopped, your hands
still on the wheel.
The way the sun rose flaming
your windshield, your steel blue hood.
And then the thought of stepping out
into the tall trees, someone’s arrangement
of tendon and bone, pulse and hunger, yours to carry
into the cool, articulate ferns.
The morning’s composition—thrushes, wind, the shadow
of a gliding osprey fleeting as some notion of light
or leaves or shape of blue as only surface,
as only a kind of blindness—
and then the notion of you framed
behind the glass, approaching
but never reaching the untended
field, the unquarried stone—
as over there the edge of the woods, as beyond there
shadow, shadowed green, farther, thorn.
Charles Hensler lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Identity Theory, Rust & Moth, The Shore, Parentheses, River Heron Review, One Art, Stone Circle Review and others.
Emerge Literary Journal 