The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Genevieve Kaplan's "In the Ice House"

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In the Moments of our Minds Untangling, Each to Each

Where, in the distance, it’s a bit of heat, of light, the mind at rest.
I like the moments of it, the big game awaiting.

Loss of the hunted.
Anywhere in the blue wonder, the shy wondering
what is at hand. They whisper in the dusk,
in the twilight, aft and fore, creeping up the stairwell.
Each to his own troubled paradise, misfortune of the fortunate,
each to his own admiration.

Because in this instance, on balance, our own goodness
showing through, each breath of air retreating
where the blame lays.

Yet each attempt worsening, and each stance slowing.
The black cat of each doomsday, the sharper call to appear
as the cat falls off the highest shelf,
the cat who splits, the lonely escape.

In short of being lame, in spite of being assured.

I see how it looks up here, in the highrises, each to his own footfalls below
about to amount to nothing—
the proof having always been longer than the desire,
than desire at last. And each loose step placed in the wrong.

This selection comes from Genevieve Kaplan’s collection In the Ice House, available now from Red Hen Press. Purchase your copy here!

Genevieve Kaplan is the author of In the ice house (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation‘s poetry publication prize, and settings for these scenes (Convulsive Editions, 2013), a chapbook of continual erasures. She lives in southern California and edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose. For more about Genevieve and her work, visit her online at genevievekaplan.blogspot.com.

Leslie LaChance edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration, has curated The Wardrobe for Sundress Publications and written poetry reviews for Stirring: A Literary Collection. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, and her chapbook, How She Got That Way, was published in the quartet volume Mend & Hone by Toadlily Press in 2013. She teaches literature and writing at Volunteer State Community College in Tennessee, and if she is not teaching, writing, or editing, she has probably just gone to make some more espresso.