Patrick Pritchett

The New Formalism
for Ingrid Nelson

This is brilliance.
Autumn's tip edged with red, stripped of content.
The calm, all-to-gold aftermath
of that falling
and later, after the anguish, gray pavement.
Night comes.
Turnstile and detritus.

This was measured.
As if the afterlife might, by some rare chance,
seize you with its power
of a Sunday afternoon.
The geese cruise at altitude
wingbeat to the arrowed horizon.

Everything I know
begins and ends with the suppleness
of that word.
Vowel splendid in its rumor of archive and promise.
Evening as the happenstance
of a late star rising to grace, or nowhere.
This is nowhere - to be so graced.