Eileen Duncan

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Sunflowers

Too many silent lions. Padding through
the Dutch fields at night, their raggedy heads
faceless by day, each a tufted canvas.

Your canvas buckles, punctured by dimension, its weave broken
by their fibrous droop and rustle.
A line swoops until you are fetal, lost in specks of green,
a flawless thrum in your brain.
Each yellow roar swallowed in amber,
a honeyed, tongueless lover.
Each dark pause a cypress unraveling.

Perhaps you never saw it coming, the yellow spouting
from your fingers, your haunted self embedded in oil,
becoming more real as color evolved to motion.
Your final creature would never pose, but shudder
and blink. What you conjured in darkness
haunts us still, your yellow howl writhes
irrevocably within us, toward anything left sleeping.


Copyright Eileen Duncan, 1996

Eileen Duncan has studied with many poets, including Adrienne Rich, Frances
McConnel, and Beth Bentley. Her work has appeared in Fine Madness
and is forthcoming in Seattle Review and Rain City Review.