One Poem by April Goldman

So Much Red Cloth

Sweetgum crimsons a color even the quail can’t bear to drink, even the dark-eyed deer in their dark minds, turning

their many pages, but it’s the tiny, fluttering wings of the trout, as the black bear pulls folds from the dark closet of her body, letting them spill on the ground, like so much red cloth, it’s the tiny wings I want,

while her mouth opens and closes, opens and closes, like a metronome. Her steely eyes, rainbow, but gray. Not to make sense of her, not like that, but that I might see more clearly

I bow and wash my face in the lake
of self. Like a red dress
capturing the breeze in its folds, my heart.

Morality is something I feel in my body, sharp and sweet,

as the bear eats like a song from the open brass cymbal of the trout, the beautiful curls of smoke rising lower in the valley, and the soft fact of being. Being warm and alive on the cool lens of the earth.