Thanksgiving
The fox is in his shadow. I am under the hill.
A loose sense of things metastasizes
And we are suddenly shifted to another key,
The barley thick round here this time of year.
Desire, like fire and water,
A faithful servant and a willful master.
There is always a cleaving and a burning
No less than there is fleshlessness:
We are bound to what we love, body after body,
Each turning in the sun for days
And then incandescing in another way, seen
In other ways: and then we will speak star to star.
These late days
Are brilliant in their ardor, a latent pallor
So distant from the sun, so pure
In their desuetude. Nighttime comes with the hush
Of expectation, but what we waited for was pure,
Was nothing at all.
Jordan Silversmith lives in New York. His poem Praxis was chosen by Philip Metres
for the 2020 Slippery Elm Prize in poetry. His novel Redshift, Blueshift won the 2020
Gival Press Novel Prize and was published by Gival Press in 2021.