Blackbird Archive
← v2n2, Fall 2003
Poetry · Volume 2, Number 2

Lullabye

Lisa Russ Spaar

Espaliered tree of my quieting ovaries,

  arched in their lightless cloister,

& his milky seed's circuitous passage there:

O, bodily mysteries, remind my Love

   how love is impossible

unless we know it to be so—the way,

walking up the mountain, he feasts,

   first, on the pond, hushed in its berceuse

spin of mist, then, farther up,

on the grove of unburdened trees

   in their stand of gold.

How to hold it all at once,

except by passion's climb,

   its rising tides & breathless,

hawk's-eye view? Believe the fallen leaf

from one world floats there,

   in another, tawny star on the black water,

the soul's cradle,

even when he must pause

   to rest his racing heart,

& cannot see it?

lovebodydesire
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.