Work
POETRY
by Joseph Fasano
All day I’ve watched the wrens nest
in the willows.
Desire
sways a life
across its rivers
like a lost horse dragging its saddle.
And so? And so?
What will they say of me
at the end, then:
he was lost; he sang; he tried to praise.
The Egyptians, it is written,
faced their judges in the underworld
and told them everything, everything
they weren’t.
Hush, now.
It is summer, lushest summer.
Another love
is gone again,
another. The wren stares
at her own nest
in astonishment, its little cup
of dust, of twigs, of hair.
And the heart, the brittle gift
we salvage?
The work you do
is secret, always secret.
You scrape away,
in darkened years
of secret,
every twisted thicket
that it isn’t
and suddenly, if roughly,
it is there.
Joseph Fasano is the author of The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, a novel released by Platypus Press in 2020. His books of poetry, published by Cider Press Review, include The Crossing, Vincent, Inheritance, and Fugue for Other Hands, winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award. Fasano’s work has also appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Boston Review, Tin House, and other literary journals.
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