Aubade with Faultline & Broken Pipe

ISSUE: Summer 2020

& when at night there is an earthquake
& in the morning the upended gutter

flows out through the broken mouth of sidewalk
& the freed stream splays & loosens

asphalt & Key Route grows impassable; when
this muddy torrent now recalls

the way in marches we the people
do reroute the streets, I remember

how the pressures exerted
by earth-force are continual & invisible,

how eruptions are instantiation.
Bataille believed the sacred lies in interruption

the festival tent was unloosed & flapping
after the hurricane

what hurricane what interruption

in an epoch of pressure
unburied water claims its path

a force acquires

a voice
a valence
also: It sings as it goes

Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Last West and Rift Zone, both from Red Hen. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Poetry, the Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies. She was a Fulbright scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has served as the poetry critic for All Things Considered for over a decade. She teaches poetry and nonfiction at the University of California, Davis.