Carolyn Oliver
Sunset casts a madder wash across
the last nun in the scriptorium,
coats in rose her last psalm,
her quill from a river-plucked
swan. Near the margin, a gash—
the parchment maker’s lunarium
has scraped the vellum deeper than bare,
deep enough to make a window
to the next leaf’s gilded majuscule,
flourish of fire and lion rampant.
She lifts the filmy sheet against an oriel
and in the twilight finds, winding
through the seeming seamless leaf
(once bloodfed hide) emptied veins,
lime-washed map of body history
she can’t decipher:
here briar nettled / here mother
tongue comforted / here flies bit /
here rain lapped the red away.
[Someone lights the tapers.]
Around the tear
gently her knife
inscribes the veins, and then she paints
over their traces: vines of sleeping
morning glories arch and drip,
twist a frame for moonless sky,
anticipate the strike of marigold
lightning behind this broken skin,
which, shining, drinks her bitter ink.
Carolyn Oliver
is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, forthcoming 2022), selected by Matthew Olzmann for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Her poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Carolyn is the winner of the E. E. Cummings Prize from the NEPC, the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, and the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry. She lives with her family in Massachusetts, where she is the editor of The Worcester Review. Learn more at https://carolynoliver.net.