Two Poems

by Isabel Chenot (November 2024)

driving through desert, mid-August, late in the day
–
Then I saw a geometric language.
–
Fenceposts were just seams of air
nuanced on a flat land. Gleams of anglage.
–
Just their
rhythmic sheen would pass,
–
while every line
of desert diagrammed the low
–
sun into sentences
of waist-high grass,
–
of barbed wire, of weather-bitten
cables over scattered farmhomes.
–
The sunbows
snagged on splinters, flicked out long flares
–
on the rust-scarred filaments.
–
The sun declines,
like everything I know.
–
But slits on distance—
fence wires in the desert—
=
scrape the moon and stars through,
and rake up sunsets into lateral fires
–
from glints and vertices
and dusk’s half tenses.
–
–
–
outstretched still
–
While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Winter and summer,
And day and night
Shall not cease.
—Genesis 8:22
–
See the road stretch to haze
hinting a harder, heavier wall
of night, whispering sharper grays
of mountains. Watch the seared waysides fall
back from each mile. Look, bits of glass
where sun-beat, tangled flares of grass
burn summer motionless—
–
and think we’ll be consoled.
Some day when winter’s on my mind,
I’ll just pull off the road, and, heat or cold,
I’ll cut the motor to unbend
my seedtime in the ceaseless dust.
These waysides with their scraggled harvest
evoke the arms of Christ.
–

Table of Contents

Isabel Chenot has loved, memorised, and practised poetry all her remembered life. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood Books

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