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
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.
