Rebecca Mays Ernest lives in Dover, New Hampshire, and works in Special Collections at the University of New Hampshire
Library in Durham. Her poetry was most recently published in the anthology Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New
Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press).





Green Light

They lead the kind of headless life that could crash down on
yours, all the while quiet and close.
Yell timber to theory, come to the fence
stymied by a still geometry.

This is the fence that new growth occurs on either side of
if in some separate activity like getting dressed we
graze wavelengths in the tone of the shape of a bell.
If you can even find a grain of truth, vegetable or mineral.

What is just out of reach differently needs touching.
A hard punch in the center siphons opalescence from your sighs
sucked into little round open options, making sugar
that tucked anger showeth not.

But red light came before green.
My best motives are the least specific,
pools of ice blue oxygen where spent
electrons go, subatomic serum flavor.

Green light is all that penetrates the sea,
all there is is what you would or would not do,
hammock that protects from shame and sheds
green light on grass mistakes.

In plants, everything goes to the work,
splitting the wetness of water so that there are no solutions.
Gender can depend on temperature.
Thought is the most expensive thing in the world.

Surety is the template for repeatedly original acts.
Even in shadow, everything we tell each other
is wrong, replacing our money with the love of it
when we prune the tree of knowledge of good and evil.







Declarity: Colleen

What it is to teach to dance
"an undistinguished gray smudge
of unformed movement"
grouped around habits dimly felt,
hungers for an unknown sandwich
le corps morcellé in pieces following her there.

The chance is already taken.
We notice detail, wonder how to incorporate it.
She is the way the past relates to the present
quick, strong, direct
and flexible progression, slurred, notes
of an ancient unity muscling in on
mis-laid block;
how to walk and how to run
how to look and how to listen:
to whom her sleeves are given
peaks in the trace-form
partnering her body memory
draped or turned out from the hip.

Push the go gospel,
precision serving love
for which no dose, from which no independence,
palpate these words, and the floor, attack, release
limbs in harmonic circles appropriate to our bodily construction
collect the satisfaction of everyone moving around embedding
recall layers wedding the future
crowns of glory flying out of bounds
waltz like memory now itself light, sustained,
phrasing condensation boundaries in space
lost closing your informed eyes

in the difference between pantomiming a hug,
and communicating the feel of one.







Batavian Snowflakes

The quilt, snowflakes over my bed
The tablecloth, snowflakes over my table
Holiday Inn post-season, Genessee county.
There is no starting gate, only

Representation of roses;
Frozen crosses between geometry between physics between chemistry
If geometries are conventions
If physics is artistic
If chemistry is a process
The process of conventional artistry
Delicate hard science.

To sleep around nightmares in an empty dining room
Haubergeon, the short mail jacket
Hauberk, the chain mail tunic that covers the neck
Basinet, pointed steel helmet
Beaver, jaw guard or visor
Corselet arms the torso
Power Lunch
Paper Trail
Polka Mass
Cash Cow
Garlic Bat
Work Ethic
Bangtail in bards, worth of caparison
Fast verberate leaving echoes

Both hands up in blessing and surrender
Amish broke to all equipment, parades.