“Breakage”
Sunday, 6 January 2019
As we start a new year, we start a new volume of Heron Tree—and so we launch volume 6 with “Breakage” by Kelly R. Samuels. It begins:
Of chalk this, that which crumbles
in the hand. And, too, dusts it.
The banged erasers in the courtyard, the remnants drifting,
and your hands so white nothing made them clean but water.
Which, frozen, is the glacier. Melting and then solidifying
and then melting again, and then surging, cascading,
like those falls found in another landmass across another sea,
seen better from the top, from the rim of the cut gorge.