D. Walsh Gilbert

Visiting My Thin Place

 
I’m familiar with liminal space and that slender invisible
slippage between here and there where a body can
disappear like a rabbit into underbrush, the one

who gets away. Now, I focus on graceful liminal time,
that shift of energy between summer and autumn
nearly imperceptible while in a melancholic trance

of vivid details—the bronzing of a leaf, the whirr
of the last hummingbird, the frantic lust of yellow jackets
on ruptured apples, the gloaming dawn & auroral sunset

as disorienting as the early darkening or some scurf
of nest-building too late in the chill. To get my bearings
I visit the meadow with pen and binoculars to harvest

fodder from the pastureland with its burrowing mole.
I, too, consume the liminal blind, skitter among rough edges,
feast on grub & earthworm, then dig deeper underground.

In the minutiae, a single grain of crystal quartz
faceted like salt and just as transparent—a solid hexagon
able to imbed inside my small finger, and without hesitation

I let it. How quick is the slippage. This conchoidal scrap
—like a scallop shell— this shred of white sand riverbed
brings me back to the beginning. To a fragile flint beginning. 

D. Walsh Gilbert is the author of Ransom (Grayson Books), Once the Earth had Two Moons (Cerasus Poetry), and imagine the small bones (Grayson Books), a full-length book of poems in communication with the art of fish and birds. Her chapbook, [M]AR[Y], about her elderly aunt moving into assisted living, was selected for publication by Kelsay Books, forthcoming in September 2023. Her work has appeared in The Field Guide Magazine, The Lumiere Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and Thimble Literary Magazine, among others. She serves on the board of the non-profit, Riverwood Poetry Series, and as co-editor of Connecticut River Review.