Blackbird Archive
← v17n2, Fall 2018
Poetry · Volume 17, Number 2

Mate Madrigal

Lisa Russ Spaar

Which was it said take me with you—

body or mind? Which leapt first

toward him, walking in dusk’s molten ingot

transversing the lawn, as a lone swan thirsted,

blue geisha on the fake lake, dragging in wake

foam’s bridal train. As if they were colliding,

constellations & colostrum awoke beneath lace,

cells, ovaries, already recalculating to new tides,

weft, then warp, though I couldn’t move.

The future did not love us yet. I loved it.

Pale with oil, with fingertips of snow, then kindling,

I brushed the enchant, the loom, his woolen jacket.

A gesture chaste enough. Touch just a whisper.

But in that synaptic stitch I was named forever.

lovebodymarriage
Lisa Russ Spaar

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author or editor of more than ten collections of poetry and criticism, including Orexia: Poems (Persea, 2017) and Monticello in Mind: 50 Contemporary Poems on Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Review , Kenyon Review , Literary Imagination , Pleiades , and The Yale Review . Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books , The New York Times , and The Washington Post . Spaar’s honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. She is professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia.