Green Linden Press

The Bonfire

We go through gray grass.
The ocean holds its ground. Some things
are carried inside. Others are broken and stranded.
We recognize the air of bladder wrack, shells,
and fish. We know the peripheral
executions of a tide. One wave lightly follows
the next. This is what we thought
to make but couldn’t. The dunes
are a raised gray passage
picked out by silver. We go through gray grass. We
move to the open
sand and empty our arms. We stand the longest
driftwood in a pointed circle. We add the scrapped
wood of a door, the rotted planks
of a widow’s porch. We try to find
the composure fire disowns. The lost side
of a house in shadow, the strange transparency
of rising waves. We dig our seats
far down in the sand,
the bonfire at
the center.

Sarah Gridley is the author of four books of poetry: Weather Eye Open (University of California Press, 2005), Green is the Orator (UCPress, 2010), Loom (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013, awarded the 2011 Open Book Prize by Carl Phillips), and Insofar (New Issues Press, 2020, awarded the 2019 Green Rose Prize by Forrest Gander). Other honors include the 2018 Cecil Hemley Award and the 2019 Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is in the first year of an MA program in Theological and Religious Studies at John Carroll University.