Kristina Marie Darling is an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of four chapbooks, which include Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006) and The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006). A Pushcart Prize nominee in 2006, her work has appeared in many publications, including The Mid-America Poetry Review, PIF Magazine, Janus Head, The Midwest Book Review, The Arabesques Review, and others. Recent awards include residencies at the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.
Entropy
The stars have formed their equilibrium
of imperfections & to ellipses that circle
nothing that there are dark hours
among ruins of kitchen tile & the unread
recipes from mother near the stove.
I have taken measure
of your love with a shattered
instrument and was not the first. A fleet
of glass fracture could tell only distance.
I begin to think that there are gravities
other than repetitions charted and observed –
those that have existed
independent of any thought.
When I see you, as I have for the duration
of the flux in February & its forgeries
of warmth, I am absolved of any
destination. Again it becomes the question
of a desecrated place of waiting.
Some things are undone by what is tied to them –
the ashes that linger or glass
unswept even by the wind.
And when all remnants have fled
there is still an awakening near the window –
the slow
realization that there will be only that same
equilibrium where most are left
alone, the few pieces of the sky
that have not drowned in brightness
& tea that is made every morning like this
that undarkens eyes and bears away
any remembrance of the night.