Vincent Poetry Prize Winner
Isabel Neal
June
I have been here before. I have been here
before. House without air,
I leave you and lock your door. That year
a parallel, devilish form. Now, I hear
foghorn across the sound and love
its sorry note. I’m here, I said,
and said, and said. I walk the low
marsh trails all day
and itch. I’m chasing any air that moves.
False apple, clustered and sweet
but if you bent, as I bent, to dip a nose–
no scent. Of the mosquitos, I feel
the first bite, but it’s fleet. One brother
throwing the bike down to watch
marsh egrets; one brother disappearing
into phragmites’ lush beat. Or is it
that the path curves? Were there ever two?
I grieve you, house. Your flock. Your door.
_____
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
from “Wild Swans” by ESVM
Julia Bouwsma’s Comment:
“June” is a spare and gorgeously rendered poem in which the embedded Millay line—House without air, I leave you and lock the door—functions as a central, impeccably placed metaphor for grief. “I have been here before,” observes the speaker, closing the door only to step out, restless and slightly stunned, into the reverberating openness of loss. Quiet repetitions, simple yet luminous imagery, and subtly echoing sonics form a series of slightly disorienting apertures, and we walk through them, alongside the speaker, “chasing any air that moves” as we navigate the blurred line between present and memory, between what we cannot hold onto and what we can never outrun.
