So It Goes — Blackbird Archive

← v16n1, Spring 2017

Hover, drift, sidle, twist,

dipping a wing, leveling off,

great feather-light planes of color

threaded together like a Miró

mobile suspended in a gulf

of darkness inside some museum

of forgotten days, the faces of strangers

gazing upward, mouthing words you

cannot make out from this all-

consuming distance: hospice, the bed-

side gathering, the long night followed

by the even longer morning.

mortality grief illness family

Steven Ratiner

Steven Ratiner is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including his newest chapbook Button, Button (OpenEyes Press), a collaboration with Mary Cain. He is also the editor of Giving Their Word: Conversations with Contemporary Poets (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), which includes conversations with Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, and Mary Oliver, along with the last full-length interview with Bill Stafford before his passing. Ratiner’s work has appeared in Parnassus , Agni , Hanging Loose , Poet Lore , Salamander , Quarterly Literary Review Singapore , and Poetry Australia . He has written about poetry for The Christian Science Monitor , The San Francisco Chronicle , and currently reviews for The Washington Post . Photo by David Andrews