By J. Estanislao Lopez

Featured Art: The Petite Creuse River by Claude Monet

     The enunciation of one syllable
     lasts two thousand years.

     The only mode it knows:
     confessional. All it has witnessed,

     condensed into a single line.
     We’ve compiled the research,

     and can say with some certainty
     that the first word is Above.

     2. The River Recites a Poem

     Obsessed with revision, the river
     never completes a line. No one

     attends its readings anymore
     as they go on for months.

     Each phrase spills out, then
     is sucked back in and altered. This

     continues until, by the merciful
     winter, the river is shushed.

     3. The Sky Recites a Poem

     The first experimentalist, the sky
     reduces every image to abstraction.

     Soap dispenser becomes Absolution.
     Mandolin string becomes Disquietude.

     Its diction of emptiness surrounds the reader
     until he is extinguished—This isn’t murder.

     This is nothing but the semblance
     of control.

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J. Estanislao Lopez’s poems have appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Waxwing, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and lives in Houston.

Piece originally published in NOR 13.