Christie Collins
Look for Me
My body is less enduring than a clay pot,
than the nest of a wood thrush
if built in the right nook of a parkway pine,
than a perennial flower which can die
and be reborn each year in the same place.
It’s something the body knows
that the mind must learn: that each human
life is a priest, is a prayer, is a piano hymn.
When I am gone, look for me in the poems
which I wrote perhaps too cautiously.
Look for me back at Francis Cove, where
my hair hangs upside down
in the stalks of the tobacco field,
where the square glass of my eyes blink
in windows of the old Doc Bill house,
where my breast rises and falls in the slopes
of the mountains, blooms in the orbs of the apples,
where my veins breathe, my blood sings
in the moving geography of the creek,
where my teeth will scatter in the gravel,
where my spine will bend into the curves
of a dirt road so as to show you
the way to an old, forgotten orchard
that I once called home.
~
Christie Collins is a full-time instructor at LSU and is working to complete a PhD in Creative Writing at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. Her poems have recently appeared in Reunion: The Dallas Review, Wicked Alice, Cold Mountain Review, Canyon Voices, and So To Speak. Her chapbook is Along the Diminishing Stretch of Memory, published by Dancing Girl Press in 2014.
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