Today’s Throw Back Thursday poem is, “world/axis” from Brenda Hillman’s 1997 collection Loose Sugar. Brenda Hillman is an activist, writer, and teacher. She has published nine collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press, including Pieces of Air in the Epic, winner of a William Carlos Williams Award; Practical Water, for which she won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry; and the International Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire. 

 

world/axis

That she would come to meet you
as if to solve the enigma of your being…

The feminine might bend the light–

             (It could involve seeming
              recognized or sought–)

The visitor comes,
not an invention but
an axis of something already invented–

(even memory is sometimes an invention
as are dreams)

–her left arm curved like a galaxy.

Others sang disarmingly among the stars.

 

 

You can learn more about Brenda Hillman at this Reader’s Companion or at her author website.