Diptych
Vanitas with Wild Rocks
Sea sure wrong
tide trick dog
glass tesserae scatter
marsh grass anchors
whose memory palace
laid up against
wandering geograph
earth writing itself
authoring upholstery
amen-able to shining
as tankers out to sea
Diptych
Vanitas with Penumbra
paraselenae penalty
cataract peached
over dark
that would speak
but for a silver platter
empty shout yet called
super, mark it down
for cymbalism
Diptych
Vanitas with Chasm
memory is a canyon
every descent
scrapes deeper
[space]
Vanitas with Domesticated Rocks
Dense as a child’s
pitted heart
plague pocked
grotto dust and dazzled
alien cerebellum drilled
Antarctic algal ice
green silica zipped
into florid waspwaisted
gargoyle cairns
chorusing carmen
with repotted pathos
[space]
Vanitas with Umbellifer
spaewife waylaid
midwife laid low
comes the mower
nighthawk’s ally
against the bad seed
every moon goes new
every lace head its own
salver, assayed
[space]
Vanitas with Chiasmus
hourglass scarf
no body to fill it
railways cross-multiply
chromosomes
ladies and tangents
empty asymptotes
liable parallel
corpora contingencies
nobody ever filled up
scarfing hourglasses
Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize), and three chapbooks. Her poems appear in TriQuarterly, Image, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, Prelude, Consequence, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts. (Online: carolynoliver.net)
Find her on Instagram @CarolynROliver