Robin Reagler

Poem

	I am sorry not to have written you sooner.

     We are peculiar forms, like someone's old papers 

 rifled quickly through 

But not read before the burning.

      How to speak of the icy cave-like place 

	I lately feel, 

Its white reluctance dividing me from all things 

	I desire and see.

      I think it must often be the case

That one holds within oneself a cold guardedness, 

	expectant, deeply quarried,

      The way mistakes grow magnified inside the mind, spiked and strongly
           gleaming.

How skilled, how dominant, this white unswaying place.

      And I wonder how, bred from our churning, it 

		constructs itself so strongly 

Like the crush of light I sometimes at the noonhour 

		hear.

by Laurie Sheck, published in POOL