By Christopher Kondrich
The past springs out of its helix and so overwhelms me
that I can hardly carve our names in water, which checks
itself for messages to deliver to the clouds.
It is time I held my body here instead of passing
below the canopy of prescient insects and vines
whose brittle hair carries waves of silent music,
also time for the future to gather its notes into a wand.
It is outnumbered. We’ve been trading our dread
for weapons against an enemy we can finally share.
Christopher Kondrich is the author of Contrapuntal (Parlor Press, 2013) and a recipient of The Paris-American Reading Series Prize. New poems appear or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Colorado Review, cream city review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Paris-American, Sixth Finch, Timber, 32 Poems and Washington Square. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver and an editor for Denver Quarterly.
