Early Love as Archaic Landscape

by Jane Craven

 

Of my teeth, you said they made me look like a country girl
             so I focused on the trinity

of fireflies circling your head. You were a city saint
            and had no truck with the backwoods. It’s true, I loved

parting branches, the disintegration of fallen trees sidling downhill,
            moldy cackle of dried leaves, a collapsed path.

I had journeyed to the foreground
            of an archaic landscape to seek my fortune, stone rubble

of what was once home, aflame behind me at the horizon.  
            I practiced flirtation, gleaned

little learnings, listened as you offered how to pronounce
            ebullient, though I wasn’t. You wanted me

to move on and I did, cried in the car behind a supermarket
            as if alive. Even as a ghost, I hung on, slept

in your cold cottage, ate your co-op cheese, wandered
            until I felt blood warming my fingertips, caught

the fox scent of prey, or love, wilding
            through a crosshatch of blackberry canes. No need

for the melancholy of abandoned wells, or the bright static
            exchange between high clouds, which are in the past and

are immaterial. I returned to the original line, sketched
            myself in, blackened the heel of my right hand, the mind

contracting, stretching, to form visible thought:
            I have never been ruined. I am the sum of a thousand ruins.

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Jane Craven was born and raised in North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in The Beloit Journal, The Columbia Review, Tar River Poetry, The Southern Humanities Review, and The Carolina Quarterly, among others. She won the Cloudbank Poetry Prize and The MacGuffin Poetry Hunt. Jane earned an MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. Her collection, My Bright Last Country (2020), won the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize.