Adele Kenny
Even When She Isn't Sure, She Is
(After Winter Landscape by Paul Gauguin)
Not the sky flashed out in stars, or night's snapped sheet—not
what's frozen or how deep this winter is. A woodpecker taps into
its own sound, everything else unspoken. Done with hollow
apologies—she knows what gone is.
Like other abstractions—wherever we go, what's left and what's
not—stretched shadows under the snow's beak—things never as
much or as little as we think.
She says she is sure and surely not, says she is this: the sharp edge
of a laugh, whatever the cold brings in.
Bio
Adele Kenny, founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series, and poetry editor of Tiferet Journal, is the author of twenty-four books (poetry & nonfiction). Her poems have been published worldwide and have appeared in books and anthologies from Crown, Tuttle, Shambhala, and McGraw-Hill. She is the recipient of various awards, including NJ State Arts Council poetry fellowships and Kean University's Distinguished Alumni Award. Her book, A Lightness, A Thirst, or Nothing at All was a 2016 Paterson Prize finalist. She has read in the US, England, Ireland, and France, and has twice been a Geraldine R. Dodge Festival poet. www.adelekenny.com