You insist
that the world belongs to a stony-hearted goat-god-
how every time we act, we enact
his vileness; how this is no
ecstasy, just a bad labored joke.

Your body in spasm
longs to strip the flesh, but if you do
there will be nothing left but the busy
bone-clatter of tactics.

*

I will listen instead to the river,
cold as time, smelling of blood-brown leaves.



About this poem
"Although this is not a sonnet, I got interested in the possibilities of argument as a poetic mode when I started studying sonnets in depth. I keep playing with two voices, or more, or just the self arguing with itself-in a refusal of consensus, an insistence on the unresolved."
-April Bernard

About April Bernard
April Bernard is the author of "Brawl & Jag" (W. W. Norton, 2016). She lives in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where she teaches at Skidmore College and in the low-residency M.F.A. writing program at Bennington College.

***
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2016 April Bernard. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate