“Crepuscule” by Daisy Bassen
Vanity is important as snow,
As the deer in the yard
That is covered by snow, unpocked
With boot-prints. She was more beautiful
As a fawn. I wanted her to be mine,
To come every twilight and look at me
Because we were alike somehow
And it was worth the risk to stand there,
Like an India ink etching, a meal for a coyote.
But I was irrelevant or perhaps deer do not see
Very well when night is coming, the snow
Blurring shadows and darkness, the lights
Coming on in all the houses, faster than candles.
I should mind her ticks, riddled with spirochete,
She is a pest, of pestilence, but her neck and her eye,
Like a witch’s eye, are beguilement. The pleasure
She gives me, the same as the snow falling
Through the night, is in my reflection
In the morning mirror. It’s a solution for annihilation,
Understanding for so long I was not even a desire,
That I will not be a memory very long, it’s placidity
In the face of recognition there might never have been
Free water. There are no edges.
*
Daisy Bassen has been published in Black Buzzard Review, Oberon, The Sow’s Ear, AMWA Literary Review, The Opiate, SUSAN|The Journal, Arcturus, Tuck Magazine and Adelaide Literary Review. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and children.
© LIT Magazine Issue #33, 2019
