Spring 2003
New Series · Volume XXV Issue 2

Contents · Contributors · Selections · Editor's Notes & Cover Art

WYATT PRUNTY

ASH

9/11

The light shifts earlier these days,
While I, inspecting it from my one room, gaze
Out, watching the inevitable change
Gather almost imperceptibly among
The lift and bow and graduals of limbs
Over the empty park where leaves shiver and blend
Before a low, bleached sun. There, something new
Assembles, a spidered lens-of-a-view,
So views really, in miniature, too many
To count but never too many to see;
An aggregate of sight, whose metal tint
Of soft-silt ash, suspended in the bright,
Balances a tungsten-like opacity
Against the mind’s small vacuum-tube capacity
For inward light—a web of filaments,
The limbs, the leaves, like little firmaments
Of unknown number, requiring some new
Symbol, this alloyed light, this unfamiliar view.

WYATT PRUNTY 's latest book is Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems. He directs the Sewanee Writers Conference and edits the Sewanee Writers Series.

Work that appears on the KR web site is from The Kenyon Review and all applicable copyright restrictions apply.