Jean Hartig is a gifted poet who graduated a few years before I did from Sarah Lawrence. Her poem and bio are below.
The American Wing
Primitive economy of these trees
resembling the knees of a man dropped
blushing beneath a girl--oh
but the light then shifted.
An insect shudders inside a wall.
The next decision would be migration.
Elevated tracks and the arch of the aqueduct
passing technologies. Our automobile
cleaved to a rail beside a river.
The story of the land's unsealing from its mothers
turns to mineral, our teeth caving, turns to stone.
He did not want to resemble the monument's
perforations, a steed crawling
flush before him. He did not want
to see his hand beginning another's name
in the water combing over the alloy.
The lie of that field more quick,
more keen. The roof is letting
something in that isn't light.
Unfaced.
A signal appeared on vees of glass, noting the number to call.
The man caught in it, panicked, and some of his fingers
uncorked their leaves.
We do not believe the other
in the scene. Only no mother conceiving
from her conjoined seas of concern,
the green-flied animal not falling from her skirts.
A fog-eyed train drew above us a catalog
of possible apogees. On its back, the reduced queen, her limestone eye
proving the canyon unmanning a purchase of steam.
Bio: Jean Hartig lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her chapbook is Ave, Materia (Poetry Society of America, 2009).
