ELEGY FOR THE CHILD WHO DID NOT DIE OF SIDS
or One Sentence in Memory of Shane Lass (1992–1992)
I am terrified of the moment
no one witnesses—not
trees falling in forests
but the glaciers
that lurch along in the nitrogen
seas of Pluto—there’s terror
in something large as Iowa
that swims quietly and unnoticed,
like a star we don’t see turning out
in the night sky above our backyards,
as in 1992, when your mother held you
close as a grocery bag, or
a head of lettuce, and tossed you
in the ditch along the road home.
—from Rattle #57, Fall 2017
__________
Zachary Hester: “I read poetry because of what Guy Davenport calls the ‘geography of the imagination.’ I’m interested in the electricity it conducts through the brain.”
