God Hunger: Chiastic

Lisa Russ Spaar

In frozen thought now & now it standeth in flame                           
I find no peace & all my war is done

—Thomas Wyatt


We had our talk at last

              & for now our talk is done.

Here, dusk seeps in with rain;

              limes still blush there, under sun.

I keep misspelling “there” as “their”;

              a pronoun is an anywhere.

Afterwards, I wept & wept—

              so many ways a body weeps from care,

which has often traveled thus

              in tristesse, travail, in wonder lust.

Patio, you said, means inner court,

              open to sky, that stellar thrust

toward which, untilled, I always rise.

              In the other sense, too, pactum,

to agree, to trust, night here, day there,

              until we, again, in glass both bright & dim,

remake again our covenant.

              No facts but what love makes of them.

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of fourteen books, most recently Madrigalia: New and Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel. Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry. She teaches at the University of Virginia.
Originally published:
December 6, 2023

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