Wood
We enter a wood.
What is the dark—waves?
Warning? The time light
tilts its leaves?
The dark wishes for all
brightness to be equal, absently.
Bondable to rays of dark,
sodden and lost, dreamers
shear the shadows of hopes.
Invite instead the arcane dawn. Hello.
Invent past light. The woods
wink and it’s day. We
wink, ancestors blushed. Offer
them a denser nest. They ate scorn. Offer
tenderness, whistle
wages of sorrow. Woodwind.
Alan Felsenthal
Alan Felsenthal is the author of Lowly (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). His writing has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the co-editor of A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton (The Song Cave, 2013) and the editor of Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt (The Song Cave, 2023). He teaches poetry at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
