Nights Mutable as Water Revise Themselves into the Shape of Our Extravagant Past

← v2n2, Fall 2003

so that even the mildest gesture

astonishes, just as this night's fickle

snowfall startles the ripening orchard,

throngs of Cortland dwarfs, rimed

in silver, curving their slim branches

to dark earth. Trailing our rockiest

good intentions, that slipshod

cortège of poor elections and risky

marriages, we hurtled, breakneck,

toward a future dubious as any history

text. And maybe we were liars,

crooning blue lullabies as we battled

for purchase, ambitious for anything

costly, even these small moony apples

charming but wrong.

memory time nature

Susan Aizenberg

Susan Aizenberg is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Her poetry collection Muse from Southern Illinois University Press won the 2003 Levis Reading Prize and the 2003 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. A two-time winner of the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council (1997, 2000) she is also a recipient of the Nebraska Arts Council’s Distinguished Artist Fellowship (2003). Recent poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Provincetown Arts, and Maggid , and translations of several of her poems into Mandarin by Chinese poet Luye have recently appeared in the Chinese literary journals Poetry Forest and Chinese-Western Poetry. She is co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press, 2001).