Iris Poem by Jared Carter

As though snow had fallen all morning long
and occasionally from deep within the storm
the sun shone through the flakes, and the room
where you sat writing - a white-walled studio
with windows facing north - began to glow.

Or as though you had stepped outside at dawn,
to see what the day's weather might be like,
and remembered that in another night the moon
would be full, and you looked up and saw it
in the west, each mountain and crater defined.

Or as though finally you took time to open
the storage box handed over by the lawyer,
the day after your great-aunt's funeral,
and found it to be full of forgotten novels
by Marie Corelli and David Graham Phillips,

Books printed inexpensively - covers
made of cardboard, paper dry and brittle,
spines broken, lines of type faded and dim,
signatures falling apart in your hands.
As you turn the pages, things fall out -

Anemones and ferns pressed flat, gathered
during afternoon walks along the river;
newspaper clippings frail as insect wings,
cut out with pinking shears, names marked
with brown ink, wedding dates underlined;

black-edged cards with inclusive years;
old snapshots of the Willkie Day parade.
Bookmarks come loose from their bindings,
scraps of ribbon, violet and yellow-green,
the pages stained with their vegetable dyes -

all of it blended together, scents and colors
intermingling even as the paper stiffens
and crumbles, becomes inconsequential.
For a moment or two these things distract you
from the storm outside, until the sunlight

finds its way down through the falling snow,
swelling the room to brightness. How strange
such intervals, when they flare, how briefly
everything looms! It is like seeing the moon
at daybreak, knowing that all such clarity

Is borrowed and indirect, that somewhere
a vast iris is beginning to close - even here,
in this room, where you sit looking through
a box full of old books, taking each one up,
letting the pages fall open where they will.


First published in The Long Story.