Poetry: Fadden

Stick & Stone

Christine Fadden

for S

Sigh. Alone to gather signs. Sticks the orbiting body has bound with twine and found things—an old net or fishing line, a mattress spring and feather. Sticks set
to pierce the rocks, to bow from river sidelines.

Wind whips off liquid peaks and possesses, burns goosebumps, splits that wicked season.
Winter skids in quick, and still, January’s birds have one or two limbs to land on.
Those broken branches lock tight when river rises: rooting for the hawks and for the girl who hawks sorrow.

One day, a pair of herons surfs the tip of the half-sunk pier.
One day, a bloated goat catches, a pale foul balloon. One more day, no?

Where is the egg-shaped, waterlogged stone left in the balance to the beam of twisted, crippled driftwood placed upon the irregular fulcrum of a boulder? See/saw all
of creation change from glistening color to insubstantial dry drifts, nothing weightier than one wet stone.

No more shifting—wait—no more the heavy body catapulting the light over a passing-over plane. United. Unshackled swallow, chocolate hawk, snowy regret from riverbed. Follow the flat blue line the herons read. She peaks
                                                                                                                   where he dips,
loosing strings of never-found and no, not-forever-bound things.
 

In regards to cereals, Christine Fadden is the female Seinfeld. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in New South, decomP, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a writer’s residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She invites you to visit her blog, dedicated to guitar gods, sirens, and small sparkly happenings on planet Earth.