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patience, belated perseverance (1)

by Rusty Morrison
 

Silver Argiope spiderlings spin a new web every night after eating the old one. Not abandoned, but consumed. Since viable nutrients would otherwise be lost. How to recognize when my own survival methods have become waste and must be reincorporated? The chill moving through my lower lumbar region is survival to cull into sustenance, as well as a symptom of the illness. For which I must develop a hunger, like a sharpening of a stone upon stone, or of night upon its stillness. A new excess of stillness each night, which night consumes.

 

patience, belated perseverance (2)

 

  
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Rusty Morrison Rusty Morrison's -After Urgency- won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize (forthcoming 2012), -The Book of the Given– is forthcoming from Noemi Press, -the true keeps calm biding its story- won Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, Northern California Book Award, Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, the DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America. –Whethering- won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She has received the Bogin, Hemley, Winner, DiCastagnola Awards from The PSA. Her poems and/or essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, New American Writing, Pleiades, Verse, VOLT, and the anthologies One Word (Sarabande), Beauty is a Verb (Cinco Punto). She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing.