RUNE

Like crossing threads of a loom,
I wove my fingers to your fingers.
Wan bloom beside another wan bloom:
our ancient Persian rug, where lingers

a rose and a tiger, blood-red the rose,
blood-red the tiger.  We lived as in the end
the pupa shroud’s surrendered metamorphose—
wings and light unfolding out of the dead

cocoon.  Once in the long night I heard a loon
call out as now I call to you—
eerie as untranslatable words written in rune.
One loon cannot be untrue

to its lover in their season; while
we part from each other, exile to exile.

Valerie Wohlfeld’s most recent book of poetry is Woman with Wing Removed (Truman State University Press, 2010). Her first collection, Thinking the World Visible, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize (Yale University Press, 1994).  Publication of her work includes New Yorker, Hopkins Review, Yale Review, Antioch Review, Poetry Review(UK), Ploughshares, Poetry, New Criterion, New England Review, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.