The Egret & the Faun
A woman reclines on darkshrouded grass,
grass that gleams white in the bright
of the moon,
moonlight that runs in refined,
daft rivulets over everything.
She props her head in her hand and dreams of July-
the conquest, the flight, the freedom.
The heat of why.
Now,
she is sorry, sorrowing,
sewing needlepoints
through the grass, lifting blades that
slice her translucent amber fingers.
It is not the time, exactly, that
riddles her intentions-
she the afflicted, erudite
astronomer-
she, the circumscribed, conscripted,
child-
she the day’s widow, the night’s
bacchante.
The ebony faun nestling near her side glances
upward into a square of star-grained sky-
* * *
Across the flat lights an egret flies,
silhouetted white.
The hill undulates behind them-
grass of points, grass of waves,
grass of the unseen observer.
The grass becomes her dress.
She pleats the grass,
brushing it with chiffon fingers.
She reconsiders.
There is nothing but this moment,
her hair scored and flaring
out behind her
like the headdress of an entombed
Egyptian pharaohess.
Her dress is white, hatched with black squares.
There is matter in the pattern.
The pattern matters-
the animal who lingers, the animal who flies away,
both caught in a dance of meteoric glances
and earthly topography.
This is not the end.
This is clearly not the end,
they seem to say.
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Elizabeth Pinborough graduated from Brigham Young University and Yale Divinity School, and she currently works as an editor. Her poetry, which explores the spirituality of the mundane, has appeared in Dialogue, Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets, and Wilderness Interface Zone.
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