Katie Ford

Little Torch

First there was delight, delight in the windchimes,

delight in the snowshoe crabs alive on the beach

after so much battering—

even though we knew it was fleeting,

something felt otherwise, each crawling life

a torch still lit past the slim pine pitch

or draw of resin it was dipped in

at the beginning of the world.

Don’t say things vanish—

nothing has to vanish if someone tends

to a creature as if to a torch,

bundling reeds more tightly as each day passes,

soaking rags in sulfur and lime,

seeing each for what it is,

bare and lit in your dark night.

Author: Katie Ford

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition and Colosseum, both published by Graywolf Press, and of Storm, a chapbook published by Marick Press. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker, among other journals and magazines.  Her next book is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2014.

Plume: Issue #18 December 2012