Kairos at Night
It seems to be a hammer
until I pick it up—
on the asphalt, white on black: a broken racket,
at the rim, says Service.
You hurl it, in the dark,
across the field, over the net.
It bounces once. There are no strings.
We are not even.
In the darkness, clover is a constellation.
After this much wet grass,
my feet are so cold, they forget.
You lift me to the stars.
But I am heavy, like a lamb
in the water. The wool gathers
again its weight
in river.
The light does to the trees
what the leaves do
to the stars.
Your head is in my lap.
It is lighter than I thought.
Your eyes, the stars
are leaving.
Clover is a consolation.
Take what you’re given,
and give to whatever you take.
Don’t complain.
I know you by the way your eyes squint through the leaves.
All of them.
—for F.W.
© 2022 Sarah Maclay
—as, after Odysseus, her body wanted to be Ophelia
The pistol came with its own music.
An echo slid from her throat:
Liquid, alive beyond common names for color.
How at night she could not swim.
Her song like a line of neon in wavering slices
across the crinoline dark
until the dogs began to bay
and men slipped into the skins of animals
to roll against the mud without the barrier of clothes.
How that bay was a living jewel—the sound, the topaz water—
the water had poured from her
and become alive.
She would wash up on the shore or float,
as white as the lizard who pulls the carriage
in a dream, all soggy finery
and hair and reeds.
Over and over
her body was painted
in darkness,
like a wine of skin.
What was true:
It was up to her to invent
her own music,
as she began to hear it
in the growing stain of sky.
© 2022 Sarah Maclay
Nightfall Marginalia, Sarah Maclay’s newest collection, is due from What Books in 2023. A winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, recipient of a COLA Fellowship, Yaddo residency, and a Pushcart Special Mention, her writing appears in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Best American Erotic Poems, The Writer’s Chronicle, Tupelo Quarterly, Manoa, Hotel Amerika, and Poetry International, where she long served as Book Review Editor. She teaches poetry at LMU.
