Dan Rosenberg | Bassinet | Carnegie Mellon University Press | February 2022 | 104 Pages
Provider
Sometimes, friend, a mountain is legible as air,
and sometimes the dust whispers to the crops
its sultry blues—or is it a dirge? Sometimes
it’s hard to tell what’s a firefly and what’s
a forest fire. All you know for sure
is this cricket, how she side-steps the shovel,
leaping deeper into the darkened garage.
To die, maybe, under a crooked yardstick
notched with years of height. What a future
you try to clever your way into, like a crow
with a pitcher of pebbles. What hot oil freckles
your arms with scars that say provider. Cough up
your delicate bones; they won’t hold
you upright, and you’re no owl deciding
what can be a part of you or not. Sometimes
the laws have loopholes where too many
fingers have worried them away. Or maybe
they were made like that, careless as a lawnmower
shaking a ground wasp nest. Sometimes it’s hard
to tell a citrus grove from a circuit board,
but here’s the place to sacrifice your son.
Here’s a ram, tangled in a bramble. And I’m
over here, finger in nose, holding this ass
by the reins, watching a wide blue nothing stretch
across the sky. Sometimes, friend, you hold
the knife. And sometimes, under a silence of wings
and empty light, the knife just won’t be held.
Dan Rosenberg, “Provider” from Bassinet.
Copyright © 2022 by Dan Rosenberg.
Reprinted with the permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.
www.cmu.edu/universitypress
Dan Rosenberg
Dan Rosenberg is the author of Bassinet (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022), cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), and The Crushing Organ (Dream Horse Press, 2012). He has also written two chapbooks, Thigh's Hollow (Omnidawn, 2015) and A Thread of Hands (Tilt Press, 2010), and he co-translated Miklavž Komelj's Hippodrome (Zephyr Press, 2016). His work has won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest.