Barbara Duffey

crepuscule song

green words on an orange background
hang on plaster like family photos
never cohering into any lesson
no matter how they’re organized 

light from the small window
at the top of the door wanes
flattening their colors each toward
brown until they agree, two illegible
shades of the same inscrutable night
fainting on the lawn like a ratio
of anything over zero, arcane
and possibly infinite, a resistance
to dividing at all, no bait on no hook,
a backfloat across a dark lake
stocked with unseen walleye
surfacing only to eat the buggy dawn

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Barbara Duffey is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Simple Machines (The Word Works, 2016), which won the 2015 Washington Prize. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Jentel Foundation and the South Dakota Arts Council. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Blackbird and elsewhere. A professor of English at Dakota Wesleyan University, she lives in Mitchell, SD, with her son.