‘So, We Delight’ by Leah Umansky

After Harry Styles

It’s clear that the stunning way we live
is nothing more than galvanized; a dynamic atmosphere,
or a subterranean battering of gods; a cosmic friction, an overtly
late regularity where love, and what we barely know, are driven
past the worst and past the drama,
down a narrow side road
with an abandoned house, a sky without stars, a darkness
where a flare once rose into a hovering beauty, and a leoparding
of light; but now that melodrama is gone and no pulling back at
the edges will empty the distance between past and present;
so, we delight
in the unexpected signs, the wink of a friend, the potential fight, the lingering
moment between inhale and exhale, it is a kind of falling, a kind of
plummeting, a plummage, a plumage, I mean, no, that’s not what I want to say;
I want to say it is all feathered in pinks and purples and blues,
and that beneath that sparkled edge of glue is a point of glitter, a shimmer
of a life beneath this life, and you see
this comes from you,
and this present has a doorway to slip through; this window has latches
and the burning, the sidestepping, the vertigo of the heart, that
is all just nerves and a spotlight; be willing you tell yourself, nothing is lost
yet, and each light that burns inside you is a new beginning: a sign of the times.

From issue #9: autumn/winter 2019

About the Author
Leah Umansky is the author of The Barbarous Century, among others. She is the curator of The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Guernica, The Bennington Review, The New York Times, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest and Magma, among others. Find out more at www.leahumansky.com.