Two Poems by Emma Aylor

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Near Winter Solstice

This mood had better be for lack of light.
Stars in city windows at three in what was once
an afternoon. White falls in squares

where faces were. Given the dark,
the cold can be expected;
given the cold, people walk in rain

with gaps in their clothes filled in
liquid, filled as if poured; people run
downhill, themselves long drops

tilted from a pitcher, wept
as if designed to mirror. On its description,
my close friend wrote: I know that cry.

Somewhere there must be a light.
Imagine gold at wrists, red to pinch
of skin, but all the color that will keep

is here—blue of winter, silver
somehow without shine
in a low cloud looping,

what’s behind the cloud drifting,
the cloud a great eyelid moving
always as if to open.

*

Camera Obscura

What compelled me to look at night
through the peephole I don’t know,

a town and house neither mine.

I saw—
well, first I heard
the train so timely its whistle passed
my nose—
but then only a single porch light

somewhere, through bare trees, replaced
upward and after in chaplets along my eye

as in Claudet’s two-inch-wide daguerreotype:
moon, three rows, eighteen exposures.

It requires the right bent

to make the large and baffling so small—

The moon as slices of pencil eraser,
as slight rubber stamp rubbed and smacked;
                                                                    moon

a porch light threaded close to itself
with each animal pause of my pulse