Shelia Black
Image by Pixabay from Pexels
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Radium Dream from Salmon Poetry Ireland. Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Ploughshares, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), named a Notable Book for Adults for 2012 by the American Library Association. She is a co-founder and current Executive Director of Zoeglossia, a non-profit to build community for poets with disabilities. She currently divides her time between San Antonio, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona, where she works as Assistant Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.
Time's Arrow
The present used to feel so real;
the future like a field I couldn’t see to the end of—
each yellowed birch, each slightly sickly
aspen in November, and the sky
lit by Orion forever chasing the wild dogs,
his wild sorrow the biggest thing in all the sky.
Now the road thins, my field like a wedge
between two lanes of cars speeding
away from me. I envy their faith in destination.
I am smaller than I thought,
and still the skies runneling like waves,
my chest beating inside like a frantic drum.
I know why birds mistake glass for sky,
window for more air, why they fall stunned
to the ground, facing briefly a forever
landscape they no longer know how
to launch themselves into. The loneliness
of one quiet stone, gleaming with rainwater
on a dark asphalt road.
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