Hold yourself still, so:
Have patience with your station at the end
of a radius, with being encircled and held
by the approach of the air or the earth.
With a constant verging and arrival–
a body almost groundless,
threshold handled roughly
as spokes never allowed
the cusp of upswing.
With the exile from companions
who must be carried at a remove,
no faster, no slower.
Each must lose a zenith
and abide that loss in solitude,
as solitude.
This rotation asks
little of itself
but your guts clutch
as if the turning
were yours to empower.
(you will learn to ask the circle inside)
(hold yourself so still)
Amy Poague is an Iowa City-based poet working at a junior high school. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fine Madness, Iowa City’s Poetry in Public Project, The Mantle, SWWIM Every Day, Really System, Mojave Heart Review, The Opiate (print and online versions), and Helen: A Literary Magazine. She is a poetry reader for Tilde: A Literary Journal. She can be found on Twitter @PoagueAmy.
Photographer’s Note: As soon as I read the title of this poem I knew I had a photo to accompany it.