Echo stampede as of horses
Filmic, tested in sand and
How come you
Close these hoof gaps into
Sounds whose images
Lie in heaps among throngs
Inevitable as fire. So
The last day comes
And we who are in front
Make elongated shadows
As if moonstruck and benign.
Never is a word
Only an ocean might say
And only to the sky
When the dark bird
Comes to sit on snow.
Poet and essayist Ann Lauterbach is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Under the Sign (Penguin, 2013) and three books of essays; her 2009 poetry collection Or to Begin Again was nominated for a National Book Award. Her tenth collection, Spell, is forthcoming from Penguin in fall of 2018. She has written widely on visual artists, most recently on Kenji Fujita and Johanna Tiedtke, and has made several collaborations. She taught in Critical Writing at SVA and was a visiting critic (sculpture) at Yale. Her work has been recognized by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and was the subject of a Conference in Paris in 2015. She was awarded the annual Poetry Prize in 2017 from Steven Holl’s “T “Space. She is Ruth and David Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, where she is also co-Chair of Writing, with Anselm Berrigan, in the Bard MFA. A native of New York City, she lives in Germantown, New York.