A Stone
wrote a book of poems,
seventy-odd pages
and each one empty.
It was called happy to wait,
and its cover was a turtle shell
scoured by weasels,
left abandoned on the beach.
Its sun-bleached husk
was blank as air.
It took years to read,
mostly because the smell
of sunlight and dust
that rose from its pages
was so distracting,
the way it conjured
mountains out of nothing,
the way it made us
drop what we were doing,
stare out the window
and forget who we were —
ξ
“A Stone” first appeared in The Threepenny Review. It will appear in Bazzett’s next collection, The Echo Chamber, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in fall 2021.
Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Tin House, Copper Nickel, and The Threepenny Review. He is the author of four poetry collections – You Must Remember This, (winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry), Our Lands Are Not So Different (Horsethief 2017), The Interrogation, (Milkweed 2017), and The Temple (Bull City 2020) – as well as a recently published verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed). The recipient of a 2017 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, he lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.
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