Emma Aylor
Aubade for Saturday
The artist can touch you as she doesn’t touch you:
that is, she has the line to trace, the brush, no word,
collision of skin with the flat of intervening light.
The paint is broad and asks no questions.
But writing for you, I find you have to be asleep,
in the other room; there is no such painterly equation,
the I see you as you see me. That we could cross
in the air between. Across the house—sun
skidding the grand cloud I woke to, soft,
feather-darkened, and which the plains wind moves
easily whole away, with only surface rushes
to mark the movement—how is it that I feel you,
at opposite points, southwest and northeast, the house
around us settling in its age, the doves outside but not yet
humming: I feel from here your bare shoulders warm
as they turn in morning sleep.
Emma Aylor reads “Aubade for Saturday”
Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water (2023), winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in Lubbock, Texas.