Emma Aylor

Distance

            “The human being is never truer to himself than when he is in motion.”
—Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Why, here, is the yellow half-moon low?
I try to start a fire through the misting night rain
that’s come. My image of you feels still,
a little small—scarcely larger than a peach stone,
like the mineral women made and held in hand and left

in sacred places, underground. Now you become yourself
a place of pilgrimage, an icon I travel to see, the impulse
otherwise to believe. The thought of you
moves me: what of you is other.

I keep stilled images of our gestures
drawn like flashlights before a lens, years ago,
the friends who carried them invisible now and saved
not in memory but behind thick summer night—

and we move there, beyond record, dark spine of distance rolled out—

The photographs show just slashes of gold
where the hands had been.

Note: “scarcely larger than a peach stone” comes from Philippe Comar’s description
of Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines in Images of the Body (Abrams, 1999).

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Emma Aylor’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades, New Ohio Review, the Cincinnati Review, Sixth Finch and Salt Hill, among other journals, and she received Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington. Originally from Bedford County, Virginia, she lives in Lubbock, Texas and is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.