It stands upright, rectangular as you’d
expect our respectable classic verse
to appear, yet new, like a window viewed
from both inside and out, a widow’s purse,
its leather black etchings on white, its loose
metal latch urging easy opening,
like a poet’s mind or murderer’s noose.
You choose. Say lost beauty of opal rings
glow once again through our imagined lines.
Whisper how love’s exhausted hope revives
within this stretching form which now declines
to remain a square, but most gladly lives,
elongated to fourteen rows of words,
mature enough to be both seen and heard.
Roger Armbrust
August 11, 2010
