Caroline Goodwin - Sky

Caroline Goodwin’s “Sky” is like still-life in poetic form, an accounting of a space and a moment, lush with “lived-in” detail. In the crisp freshness of these sparse lines, you are allowed the view from the bed of the narrator, alongside the narrator, a view of pale sky and the accents of a space inhabited. You hear the sea, perhaps even smell the brine. Despite the quiet stillness of the moment encapsulated in “Sky”, a movement is suggested, perhaps intimately, as we witness the chair that held us before we moved to the bed prior to the narrative. This is a poem of vastness as much as it is about intimacy.

Sky

a pale wash, a pinch of comfort
———–in the sound of the surf

reaching our bed

in the line of clay owls
———–on the windowsill

an ivory tusk

and wing
———–the shape of a leaf

a shoulder and claw

there is etched glass
———–and a wire of tiny lights

and the chair that held you

Caroline Goodwin

Caroline Goodwin moved to the Bay area in 1999 to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. Her most recent collections are Madrigals (Big Yes Press), Old Snow, White Sun (JackLeg Press) and Matanuska (Aquifer Press, Wales, UK). From 2014-16 she served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California.