Everything Comes First

Here we find a courtyard hushed by fountain burble,
puckered only briefly, occasionally, by a child’s squeal,
the work of building memory, eroding edifice that hardly
outlasts a saffron scarf rustling the shade of the portico,

a golden mean, a hinge popping the walls off an instant,
opening the passage of time, flooding it with shadow,
unity dilating, not time opening, experience opening
to time, turning a corner and inhaling, again, lilac.

Coming north, the season reset on us, spreading us
out, coaxing open the strain that quiet lays between us,
the way its press levers us up and rolls us out, sliding
weekend soles across the spongy pile of a hotel lobby,

smiling to the baby dressed for a wedding, bending
tomorrow’s picture out of its compression, tangible pivot,
the abscission of a Saturday peeling open, never to close,
hardening each of our joints, softening each of our thirsts.

Andrew Vogel

About the poet: Andrew Vogel listens, teaches, and walks the hills in rural eastern Pennsylvania, homelands of the displaced Lenape. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared recently in Poetry East, Crab Creek Review, The Briar Cliff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Roanoke Review, and Cider Press Review.