Rehearsal for Ending

Abstract

Rehearsal for Ending Sarah Maclay (bio) Feathers—or birds, or leaves fell slowly into the snowamong the dark thin hounds and their hunters,obscuring the wet bark torsos of the trees,larger even than the black-cladskaters on celadon ponds, grim as themorning sky and melting as,seconds later, snow—I'm sure—was floating up—flakes or white feathers losing their scantgravity as the ice began to burnalong the edges and the drifts of tulleveiling the long grass— [End Page 73] already slowed, elongated—tangled in muddy clouds of web as Mahler appeared—I think it was Mahler —or something had happened to the air, echoing the distance among those sameincreasing shades of green, in notes or in something that trembles— something else, something far apart as the roiling gray of a fishtail-braided cloud, years and seconds laterin that pentimento of rain, grainy and darkand darkening the distances of greenwaters and murky fields until it seems barely possible to make outthe few abandoned fishing boats and almost impossible to tellwhether the two tall stalks are cut-off sailsor the edges of self-pruning cottonwoods that have grown, in confusing weathers,up through salt and through the teal and emerald ofthe slippery reeds of shore toward the roiling gray corn of the clouds in their horizontal twisting above shards of wallbelow. And then white moths, [End Page 74] like motes, floating into the star-dark sky,just as after the box is opened and things fly out some of them are still alive, and light,even as the sail-cloak darkens over the body and the lover extends the fingers again toward the wound, and tries,and cannot stand. [End Page 75] Sarah Maclay Sarah Maclay is the author of three books of poetry: Music for the Black Room (2011), The White Bride (2008), and Whore (2004). She teaches at Loyola Marymount University, in California. Copyright © 2019 University of Hawaiʿi Press