After Seeing the Irish Modern Dance Theatre’s Lear

Catherine Staples

Slow light is breaking
beyond the donkey’s pasture.
Inside the darkened house
brightness rims the shutters.

Sunlight strains before it breaks,
fattens to a saffron seam.
A saint’s pageant flashes
and slides across the room.

Morning runs riot—
a tumbler’s leap of shadows.
A chandelier rides the ceiling,
the writing desk blanches

in the changed light—shivers
and stares. All of it quick
as lakewater dried in your hair,
a flame blown loose from the wick.

Catherine Staples is the author of The Rattling Window and Never a Note Forfeit. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and others. She teaches in the Honors and English programs at Villanova University.
Originally published:
January 1, 2019

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