WITH PLANET ORBITING TWO STARS (KEPLER 16B)
She’s dancing with a pair of men; her dress
Orange and scarlet, rival weathers flare
Winds around her, satin rills. She’s heiress
To a planet with two suns and veil-thin air
And, no, she’ll never take a single suitor
Where days are simultaneous not sequential,
And when the band begins, she’s cold as pewter
And warm like swallowed wine. Attraction is equal
Between two circling bodies (who’s the groom?)
(The stars will never touch; they orbit their double)
The men beckon. Dancing’s done. She’ll wake in both rooms
Always, if life as such is possible.
FOX
She’s vixen, varlet trickster, roamer, the keen-
Eyed-one. She stalks the road’s margin for prey,
Her ken the hunt and cunning only seeing
What others miss. (She’s seer, she’s fool.) A plié
Of roots folds down into a den, dark place
Where you won’t go. She rises for the catch
Again; your muscles feel the stir of a chase
You knew before you stood inside. You watch.
A stunted squeal comes in the open window
From across the meadow. Almost night. It’s done.
The rabbit, dead in her teeth, paws at the stalks
Of grass before she rips its fur and swallows
Unwinding innards, then leaves the scoured skin
Of what’s inside her now becoming fox.
TRAFFIC LIGHT
It’s all a game, a festival of misrule,
The blinking colored lights that flash a code
You watchfully obey. You let it rule
All waking moves; it’s monarch of the road.
Resist the lure of the red light district’s glow.
Go green and save the polar bears, the climate….
But then in church, sometimes, you’ve paused in yellow
Candlelight and asked for time, more time.
And suddenly morality and god, careers,
The internet and what you did in bed
Become outlandish riddles croaked by seers
At Delphi or Norns beneath a tree. They’re right:
You got pulled over at this traffic light.
***
Author's note:
The previous poems all use forms invented by the poet Greg Williamson. The first, “Girl Dancing with Planet Orbiting Two Stars,” is a “double exposure” poem, a form which contains three poems in one. The bold lines make one poem, the non-bold lines make a second poem, and then a third poem, the “zipper poem,” is created when both sections are read together. This poem was inspired by the discovery of the planet Kepler 16B, the first observed planet with two suns.
The second two poems are both versions of the “Greg Williamson sonnet.” The form requires that a death occur in the ninth line and that the last word of the poem be its title.
***
Katherine Robinson grew up in Maryland, near Washington, DC. She graduated from Amherst College in 2008 with a BA in English. She is currently an MFA student at Johns Hopkins University, studying with Mary Jo Salter. Between degrees she worked at a wildlife sanctuary in the Shetland Islands and at the Folger Theater in Washington, DC.