SWALLOW

By Paisley Rekdal


So ignorant of the world I think it’s pleasure first

that makes it dip hallucinatory arcs 
across this foggy, close-cropped field
and not the insects wet legs kick up– 

Here, and almost here, these

sharp darts that stop me in my tracks: poised, senseless
to its direction 
skimming just below, the lingering white

only it sees through and negotiates where I 

am less than a stone to it, less than a flea 
in the dun belly flashing under the slick blue back– 

Wings clip the brief air between us, 
scythe the sweet middle of my life where sea mist
seeps its yellow curls, the step ahead and behind me blurred 
to the same cold capacities.

Somewhere a twist of fence, a scar

of ragged earth a truck tore open in the grasses
to work itself free. 

Dark shank of hair 
gleaming in the wet, skin frozen to the bone,

a pair of deer feeding at the wild
last hedge of raspberries.


Paisley Rekdal, a professor at the University of Utah, is the state poet laureate and the founder of the Mapping Literary Utah website. She has written nonfiction books (“The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee,” “Intimate” and “The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam”) and six volumes of poetry, including “Nightingale.” She was the guest editor for the “2020 Best American Poetry” collection. Her most recent book is “Appropriate: A Provocation.”