Frannie Lindsay

Invitation

Go now to the silence. It has longed for you
as a mother longs for her ransomed child.

Go, and take off your shoes, your gloves,
weave from your shadow and ache

a rough blanket. Lie down. Your body
knows itself everywhere now,

just as a deep sky knows each river and cliff,
each still meadow lazily dotted with goats.

Take off your watch cap. Allow wind
to lift it away like a raveled nest and mingle your hair

with coarser, more flammable grasses, rattling
toward barest winter. Allow sleep. Allow gratitude.

Allow the essential and hesitant leave-taking.
Now may the soft-eyed wolves approach

with the same moon tucked in their hearts
and their hungers ordained.

Now like a sprig of thistles a schoolgirl picked,
may you be forgotten.

And your old name join its fellow rustlings,
and you always be loved.

Author: Frannie Lindsay

Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume of poetry, The Snow’s Wife was published by Cavankerry Press as part of their Notable Voices Series. Her other titles are If Mercy and Mayweed (The Word Works); Our Vanishing (Red Hen Press); Lamb (Perugia); and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press). She has held residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Millay Colony. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and many others, as well as The Best American Poetry and The Plume Anthology of Poetry. She is a past winner of the Missouri Review Prize.

 

Plume: Issue #85 August 2018