Dane Hamann 

Moonlight by Edvard Munch

​The outbursts of your mind are
considered automatic & stylized

open spaces. Your hand just glides,
seeing the way night takes a lungful.

Consider this sky & shoreline,
a thin white channel of bone

dripping like wax. A cloistered
midsummer awash in a cold palette.

Maybe it’s all cloud to you, or sunset
triggered by a pushbutton moon.

It’s form unanchored. A confrontation
coming into view from the forest’s edge.

You try to plump up the scene. Boughs,
impossibly swollen, starving toothpick trees.

Your best choice was an island. A shadow
of bedrock brushed with weightless gray.

You find the fullness of such a night
too easy, so you daub it out of habit

while I choke on the heat of pre-dinner
drinks, my heart caroming inside

a perfectly sized shot glass. Pour me one
more, painter, anchor me to this shore.

---

Q & A a cento based on the poems in Dean Rader’s book Works & Days

Question: what gets to be



What does it mean



​Is the opposite of darkness,



​Who’s to say


​What does it mean



​Can time’s exhaust



​What happens now?

​beautiful?



to see light?



darkness?



​the stars understand their heavy labor?


​to know time?



​be our only companion?


​

The light
​crashing down your spine.


This is the light
​that is absent of shadow.


The star’s lids
never close.


​Our voices.


The land was land
​before we were us.


Even The End
​ has to end sometime

​


​​
--
Dane Hamann is a copy editor at a textbook publisher in Chicago’s southwest suburbs. Dane is also a graduate student at Northwestern University where he studies in the MFA in Creative Writing program and works for TriQuartely Online.