Summer Elegy II | Todd Robinson
Nebraska’s bare branches
paw at skies full of pointless
blue, mercurial daymoon.
Powerless like me
or my disabled wife
wobbling our broken
palace in cashmere
and bracken. She wants
to be a florist deep
in daylilies, scatter pages
with green ink, memorize
iterations of birdsong,
but instead buries her sores
in blankets, paddles Lethe
toward the waterfall we all
fear, rejecting the premise
of a soul but still hoping,
the way moths burn
in a lamp’s ziggurat of light.
About the Author:
Todd Robinson’s poems and prose have found the (web)pages of Cortland Review, Prairie Schooner, A Dozen Nothing, North American Review, The Pinch, Sugar House Review, and Hummingbird. He has published two books of poetry, Note at Heart-Rock (Main Street Rag) and Mass for Shut-Ins (Backwaters). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is an Assistant Professor in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.