Frannie Lindsay

Silent Night

If you dare to let yourself out
in the starry cold, and sing

just under your breath
so your lamp flickers almost

to nothing, a giraffe will approach
from the veldt on legs that float

on a wind all their own,
teats swaying with belly-warm milk

for her calf, hidden
behind the lowest baobab limb. Then

she will bend her neck low
in the listening grasses, pause

as if she hears you,
offer her infant

a few leaves from Heaven, and keep
her distance.

 

 

Pleasure

Although the young sow will be slaughtered
tomorrow, right now there is every reason
to hope: a bucket of bruised apples

rests by her trough; the cold sun has taken
a few minutes longer to vanish
behind the silo;

a weed of a boy leans in the barn door’s frame,
one thumb in a belt loop, smoking deeply.
O goddess of all we know

and don’t know, accept this meager praise
for the worried wind that lifts his hair;
for the sweet-faced

centerfold pressed in his sock drawer, blind
to his lust; for moonlight
rendering the meadow ablaze with clover.

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 #136 December 2022