From "Coleshill" Poem by Fiona Sampson

The deer racing across a field
of the same clay and tallow
color they are—if they are:
or are they tricks of the light?—
must feel themselves being poured
and pouring through life. We're not built

but become: trembling columns
of apprehension that ripple
and pass those ripples to and fro
with the world that shakes around us—
it too is something poured
and ceaselessly pouring itself.

February shakes the fields
and trembles in each yellow willow.

•

The violin's back is not veneer—
the strummed wood shudders together.
Undivided by caution
each note is its own first thought.

My first thought's a kind of prayer
that I might resonate entire—
sometimes it's such a meager portion
shaking a little, as if it ought...

Every day, the same desire
to push myself through the door
that leads to some bright place,

brighter than the concert platform,
where the whole self echoes together—
the outer to the inner pleasure.

•

Everything runs together—
the light smells of spring,
the unreasonable brightness
of this peg, this sheet, this line tethering

linen between sky and mud
as if the garden marked a pause
in that eternal return
whose looping trace is the blood

hissing through the ventricles.
What gives you life's the thing that kills.
Until you spill the lip
trembling on its bright liquid

all you need's this play of surface—
all that you need. All you have.