Arizona Poets is a series featuring 20 poets from Arizona in honor of our 60th Anniversary. These poets have all visited the Poetry Center and recordings of those visits are available in our audiovisual archive, Voca. Click here to learn more about our anniversary and here to see the rest of this series. 

Richard Siken is the author of Crush, winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and War of the Foxes. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, two Lannan Residency Fellowships, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson and is the co-founder and editor of Spork Press.

See more of Siken's work on Voca.

 

THE WAY THE LIGHT REFLECTS

The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects,

so what’s there to be faithful to? I am faithful

to you, darling. I say it to the paint. The bird floats

in the unfinished sky with nothing to hold it.

The man stands, the day shines. His insides and

his outsides kept apart with an imaginary line—

thick and rude and imaginary because there is

no separation, fallacy of the local body, paint

on paint. I have my body and you have yours.

Believe it if you can. Negative space is silly.

When you bang on the wall you have to remember

you’re on both sides of it already but go ahead,

yell at yourself. Some people don’t understand

anything. They see the man but not the light,

they see the field but not the varnish. There is no

light in the paint, so how can you argue with them?

They are probably right anyway. I paint in his face

and I paint it out again. There is a question

I am afraid to ask: to supply the world with what?

 

From War of the Foxes. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, ©2015. Reproduced by permission of Copper Canyon Press.