John Sibley Williams

I Tend to See Love as an Absence of Context

Earlier,  the sky.  The unchurched  pigeons holding  the  sky  up by  its steeple.
Stars  made of blown  glass blowing  off this lip  of sky as  if the  earth’s  as flat
as  Homer  envisioned.  Oceanus.  Or  any  encircling  body.  Earlier,  a  mother.
A hand-me-down heaven tattered as any  blanket meant to swaddle an entire
life.  A life still in conversation with  that gone  body.  Earlier,  to make loss holy,
they called it providence.  Now we tend to let the ashes scatter. To make room
for whatever comes next, we shoo the pigeons from the steeple holding up the
sky & let  things  fall  where they must. Shattered glass underfoot. I guess now
we call it gravity. Earlier— 

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John Sibley Williams is the author of four award-winning poetry collections, including The Drowning House, Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, As One Fire Consumes Another, and Skin Memory. A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series.