The Desert Prophets
by James Owens
A hollow in the nubbed lacework
of seconds, the centuries' lens
has focused you here, burning
a beginning in the breathturn,
a shift of silence toward word
across the texture of bone, salt taste
of earth in the gathered mouthful of air,
trapped in the throat that knots against
itself a speech spindly with longing.
James Owens's most recent book is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020). New poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Grain, Queen's Quarterly, The Christian Century, and Dappled Things. He lives in a small town in northern Ontario.
