Today’s poem, John Rybicki’s “Tender Range,” is an incantation that seems particularly fitting for a crisp fall day. It’s a series of lyrical fragments arranged as a kind of stay against loss and death. We liked this poem for the way it subtly but persuasively finds a fresh language for the sense of imperilment that lurks around us, as in the eerie lines “I don’t know anything / about blowing a child out/ like a balloon, or what comes after— .” —Meghan O’Rourke
TENDER RANGE Come the white morning I’ll cross the earth on my face, let the barrel of light tip over one more time and let’s just call it sunrise. I don’t know anything about blowing a child out like a balloon, or what comes after— that dream like a waterfall sealed in a flask close to God’s hip. It’s night now with those squares of light all over the world, there where a woman has been spreading her own light onto the windows of her house just like I have rubbed oil onto your belly. Mothers daub their fire to the glass so even a scarecrow like me out wandering the night can take his chin out from inside his coat, there where his own lantern is hissing. To gaze through the glass and stop the crunch of footfalls over the bones of things I cannot fix. Do you know how many hobos like me are out there where the wind howls? We gaze up from where her fire pours over the snow: because we know she is in there doing her soft work.
TENDER RANGE
Come the white morning I’ll cross the earth on my face,
let the barrel of light tip over one more time
and let’s just call it sunrise. I don’t know anything
about blowing a child out like a balloon, or what comes after—
that dream like a waterfall sealed in a flask close to God’s hip.
It’s night now with those squares of light all over the world,
there where a woman has been spreading her own light onto the windows
of her house just like I have rubbed oil onto your belly.
Mothers daub their fire to the glass so even a scarecrow like me
out wandering the night can take his chin out from inside his coat,
there where his own lantern is hissing. To gaze through the glass and stop
the crunch of footfalls over the bones of things I cannot fix.
Do you know how many hobos like me are out there where the wind howls?
We gaze up from where her fire pours over the snow:
because we know she is in there doing her soft work.
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