ars poetica

He spoke of death as if he had lived it,
and I listened with the faith of a believer,
his words—soft, rivered fire, the nuzzled breath
of his father’s horses in late December.
And the lines bit like a twist from some twitch,
bringing me to notice from that night on
more than I had before. In a month,
the inconspicuous grass began to spread
as a clutch of whispers along the ditch bank,
each haunting rasp, a faint voice that would
eventually find me.

— Greg Sellers, opening lines to “Elegy with a Bird’s Shadow,” from Clackamas Literary Review