Mutabor: the gorge by Karl Kirchwey

Poems

November 2009

Mutabor: the gorge

Burke

was right!

They went down to the gorge of the Petite Gryonne,
in May, this was, a boy and a girl,
when the hairs on the stem of the nettle
stand up straight, and gray-eyed the water runs,

too cold to bear for more than a moment,
over the basalt pebbles veined with quartz,
and in the woods a bird pleadingly iterates
its song against the constant noise of the torrent,

and they lay down not far from a mound of snow
dumped from the bridge above during the winter,
from the Roman arch of the bridge, like a small glacier
shawled with filth and weeping slowly away now,

a hollow melted in it like the cave where immortal Pa ...

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Karl Kirchwey is the author of five books of poems, including The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose (2007).

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