Patricia Corbus

Reading by Starlight

Reading by starlight
I make up a story
without melody, Truth

of my own making, green
of my own greening, blue
of my own bluing,

the light in my chest the light 
from my mother who
blew apart in childbirth.                                                  

Now an elderly child, spent
and spun in tiny
and colossal circles,

I am climbing the Oak Tree
to find my ghost-mother
living near Chimayo.

She’ll seize me, enfold me
in a new-woven rug still shining
with beads of lanolin 

from the hair of her beloved goats,
Free and Form, and fling me
into leaves, branches, acorns,

seas of fireflies blinking, caught
in this blue-green spider-web
wet from my own spinning.     

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Patricia Corbus holds a Master’s degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her second book of poetry won the 2015 Off the Grid Poetry Prize. Her third book of poetry has just been published by Blue Edge Books. She lives in Charlotte, NC.