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Catherine Wing
Diptych


I.   Coventry Road

What’s the force that pulls light
into a pointed star?

Is it time or is it art—or
both—squinting into focus.

What is it that drags the road
up a street into some kind of future?

Even the windows can’t see—or
don’t—so much change.

Snow falls and melts
while we shovel in between.

Who can reliably tell us
what’s at the top of the hill?

Beyond the road’s bend
Uberstine’s is gone

but brick and lintels,
and still that painted wall.

Our tracks are lost even
as what houses us remains

gable, arch, and hearth,
swath of floor and stretch

of stair. The way a shadow
falls across a structure.

Is it our angle to it,
the sky, the sun, the dark,

time’s only fixture?
Or our angle to that star’s light.


II.   Bus Terminal, Cleveland Museum of Art

What rhymes with gone
none then all

the way the light is pitched
against a marble wall

What holds us in
a coach and circle atrium

a spread of stone
with a running vein

What closes like a book
with a lock and hinge

glass cut and barred
by a leaded window

the hour plumed
in robes of white and gold

Who doesn’t time blur
and drift and bend

a boy’s sly grin
or a girl’s frank gaze

in another instant
she’ll look away​

Catherine Wing is the author of two collections of poetry, Enter Invisible and Gin & Bleach. She teaches at Kent State University and with the NEO-MFA, the nation’s only consortial program in Creative Writing.
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