“Carmen et Error” a Poem by Rosie Stockton

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like cupid I can only shoot
one arrow at a time
but I’m practicing comrade,
I’m full of drafts. entering our
canopy, blemished and pruned,
unearthed light stumbles
through layers of orange
season’s particulate, having
never wanted to invade
anyone’s oblivion, but there
was no other place.

we could live here, I think, and we do.
in this mansion-like fallowed
field where I see you
unask why May gloom
makes the golden air feel
so fertile and extracted.

all premeditation, all the ways
I know harm are legal,
all this care knows no redress
from surplussed nematodes that jack
down the price of how we live
in this strict orchard whimsy.

I needed you
to fortify this need
with water rights, secure
applauding clouds of dust,
invent the clock and clock
out, enter muffled horizons.

I needed you exiled
outside perfection, thickly
peeled, an Ovidian error I keep
close to my mirror, dwelling with
me obscenely, eyes trained on
that slippery double, the
reservoir’s chemical fish
enact their own epic,
redact the rehearsal
& bow out.

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From “Carmen et Error,” a poem by Rosie Stockton. From the Collection Fuel. Fuel by Rosie Stockton is available from Nightboat Books.