Two Poems by Grace Curtis

Words of the Sapient

We attach lattice
to our vocabulary. Crows,

gathered in a nearby tree,
speak,
sounding like rain. Each spoonful

 of day deepens
into its own murmur.

Turn off the TV, we say. Sit
in a chair, look out

into the field
that laps up sun
like a thirsty deer at a pond.

We dip our toes into
the stream
of another species’ sentience
until it feels

like our own wings beating. We crush
winter’s left-over slurps

beneath our shoes,
hoping for the best,
forever honed
into the worst, forgetting 
to hold the crow’s words
close to our ears.

In Consideration of Seasons

What’s been written thus far is yammer
yielding to the rain drenched apple blossom
as if droop alone represents spring,

as if swooping swallows generate time
against the quiet unfolding of the Ash.
The river breaks open the earth

at a place few are destined to cross.
Fissures pushed forward
from puny crests, spill out

their hoard. Dirt, as dirt then silt,
marches into the tears, swept
by inevitable design, and piles up

at the base of another day. Hunger,
like a requiem to season, speaks
to drift’s relentlessness, to disappointment,

to forced renewal, to the obedience
of migration, to the nest builder’s diligence,
to the sun’s unstoppable impact

 on earth’s descent. Hunger
blankets the still cold ground
like a battlefield afloat, bucketing

mica and feldspar in deconstructed pails
of an undefinably hued river floating
beneath a shower of pink and magenta.

Grace Curtis is the author of three collections of poetry, *Everything Gets Old*, (Dos Madres, 2019) *The Shape of a Box*, (Dos Madres, 2014). Her chapbook, *The Surly Bonds of Earth*, was selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2010 winner of the Lettre Sauvage chapbook contest and she has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Her prose and poetry can be found in such journals as *Sou’wester*, *The Baltimore Review* , *Waccamaw Literary Journal* , and others. www.gracecurtispoetry.com