Poem of the Day
Study of Children
By Asha Futterman
did you know
that you all work for me?
I asked them as a joke
did you know
that you all work for me?
I asked them as a joke
You are in bed
and Antigone’s dead
once again though offstage
It rises from the North Atlantic’s stacks
as radio silence, a generalized lack
of discursive tone or narrative movement distinguished
And now the objects return. Chief interests
of their divine secular lives no longer
idle. Thought anticipates them, but they aren’t
Sad storm of objects becoming things,
the objective correlative, tired of me
as I am of it. I embody everything it hates
Reclaimed from brushwood,
from coarse rank grass interspersed
with stagnant bog water,
The round white knob
on the dresser drawer—
Consider the white space
between words on a page, not just
I don’t read.
I read Rilke and bleed.
The light that changes
the light that goes out
She was thinking it was time
to be naked again, to take something off