Mark Irwin’s poem, “Three Panels,” appeared in NER 22.1 (2001):
The Light
starts, then the greening, and we
stamen, anther, and fully flower in it. We sweep,
bend, and blow, finding the air. To be
is to fully have the moments, but then they
are gone, the dissolving story we cling to, looking
through its curtains, shaking the dreamy sleepers
who vanish in their rooms. The clouds all gold
in a gold light, such that we say, memory
is some light that was. The giving and finding
of light. Bodies over the years moving between
the film of lakes. How beautiful this forever
stalling. Faces glimpsed through clouds on water,
this closeness in distance, and already a remembrance of light
is touching the trees, windows, and houses of an unpeopled world.