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Susan Azar Porterfield Susan Azar Porterfield was born in Chicago and is currently a professor of English at Rockford College. Her work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Nimrod, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Rhino, Kalliope, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk (Ohio UP). Her book of poems entitled In the Garden of Our Spines (Mayapple Press) appeared in 2004. In 2003-2004, she was a Fulbright scholar in Lebanon. |
Perhaps I Can’t Explain
I was about to say that my hand rimmed like this with light
from the window
hints at some kind of truth, something
I can almost know or feel, something
that involves me so that this truth, or whatever, enters,
swirls around, lights up my body or x-rays me
like this early sun passing through my hand,
the webbing between fingers, translucent,
and in the line of the thumb, verisimilitude
that I’ve noticed before, like once when getting into bed,
the sincerity of the curve of he outside of my foot
stopped me cold because here it was, you now?
that essentialness, come out of nowhere,
and you almost get it but not quite,
like déja vu or glimpsing something behind you in the mirror
but when you turn—
something is there,
though you can’t tell what, exactly
because all around you this truth business is opened onto
now and then, a fissure is made wider now and then,
and when it is, as you’re getting into bed or rinsing a glass
or staring in the mirror, well then,
there you are, there you are, there you are—