Spotter Observations
All morning the news
goes south,
geese mobilizing
abaft
a leader's bluster.
The sky
rumpled camouflage.
No clear
outlook for these days.
A Dream of Rooms
It goes like this. The house, he knows, is theirs.
Doors open into rooms he's never seen.
Light leans across the perfect hardwood floors.
Completely bare. Walls freshly painted, clean.
He enters. These are rooms he's never seen
or else their own rooms, stripped of pointless things.
The floors are bare. The walls are white now, clean.
Their early indiscretions in deep pinks
and greens have been absolved. The pointless things
that screwed themselves into his memory,
the pain of poor decisions, greens and pinks—
Gone. All has been somehow borne away.
The plastered-over holes of memory
don't show. The mice that chewed his mind are dead,
and the whole past is somehow borne away.
A space opens beside him. On the bed
something is not. And then his mind goes dead,
empty of everything but sun on floors.
A space shudders beside him on the bed.
He wakes then in the house he knows was theirs.
Maryann Corbett is the author of Breath
Control, forthcoming in 2012 from David Robert Books, and the chapbooks Dissonance
(Scienter Press, 2009) and Gardening in a Time of War (Pudding House,
2007). She has been a winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and a
finalist for the Morton Marr prize and the Best of the Net anthology. Her
poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many journals in print and
online, including River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review,
Literary Imagination, Subtropics, and The Dark Horse, as well as The
Able Muse Anthology and Hot Sonnets. She lives in St. Paul and works
for the Minnesota Legislature.
