Sara Jean Lane

Three Poems

Wind Chimes, Too

These used to be wine bottles.
She is growing, they say, but it is not
so much becoming taller
as zooming out. At dark she shines
a flashlight through the glass, watches
the beam grow fat as it runs
from her, and says that maybe the sun
is just someone holding a flashlight
a year or so away. Her toad waddles
across the parking lot
and she says as he grows smaller
that “specimen” should be plural
and only plural. Lines
are everywhere, but hidden, like the ones
at the edges of the page—there
out of necessity, she says, because
the photographer’s job is to flatten.
Last year she was small enough to cut
her fingers on sharp wind. She hums
into the bottles and caps them, so she’ll echo
forever, and she sings into cupped hands
on still days because wind chimes, too,
need breath. The sun glistens back again
from the curve of my watch and I think:
Perhaps this is the face of God.
I say the cracks in the vase
look like veins. She says the hole in the base
makes the walls a windpipe, loud
simply because it is not soft.
All sounds are siblings in her world,
and her fingers snap like rubber bands
or cheap guitar strings
or bread dough stretched too far
or the twitch of an insect’s tiny limbs
or the cold—silent tonight
against the windowpane.

 

Comments are closed.