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Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). She is also a winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Narrative, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

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TIN BUCKET

The world is not simple.

Anyone will tell you.

But have you ever washed a person’s hair

over a tin bucket,

gently twisting the rope of it

to wring the water out?

At the end of everything,

dancers just use air as their material.

A voice keeps singing even

without an instrument.

You make your fingers into a comb.

ORPHEUS ASCENDING

A crack appeared.

Beyond it, snow was pouring through the spring sunlight.

A bright, dry snow

like particles of unearthly metal.

I emerged.

And the earth closed after me, keeping her inside,

the way an instrument case

will seal shut around its black music.

Or was I the instrument?

Or was it not music, but pain

singing from the depths?

( )

Aboveground

the peonies were smothered

in snow, bent beyond their weight with ice-white.

The bare-root apple couldn’t hold

and snapped. I kept looking back

to where the bed stood stripped

like a table.

( )

Then came the smack of snowmelt

off the eaves, the house weeping and shining

under fresh sun.

Every water bucket brimmed.

The garden—rinsed, dismantled—

breathed out a new green.

And with all the windows open, through the space

came the sound of—what were they?

Meadowlarks?

Days elapsed, years.

( )

I still live

in our little house by the orchard, sited so the setting sun

illuminates the garden,

the bubbling fountain

like a fountain of fire in the final moments

before night draws across its lid.

Then, absolute quiet.

Even the wind resting in the trees.

We on earth, how can we know

how long the silences will be

between the movements?

I wait for song

to grow in me across the dark interval.