PHILLIP STERLING

WORDS FREQUENTLY CONFUSED: CONDENSATION, EVAPORATION

Even the fog this morning plays the field,

the dips in the road, like the special effects

of early cinematography:  faint white ether

in the shape of an actor crouched above

a body of snow, as if the soul were nothing more

than forms of water assuming different roles

—steam, lake, scotch-on-the-rocks—solid

at times, liquid or gas at others, which is

exactly what I am passing through at times,

as if matter didn’t matter, as if the pulsing

thwap . . . thwap . . . thwap in my ears is nothing

more than the sound of ice melting off the roof

and splattering with unconscionable regularity

on the vinyl-clad sill of a replacement window.  

Phillip Sterling is the author of the poetry collection And Then Snow and Mutual Shores, a collection of short fiction, In Which Brief Stories Are Told, and four poetry chapbooks: Significant Others; Quatrains; Abeyance; And for All This: Poems from Isle Royale. He has served as Artist-in-Residence for both Isle Royale National park and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.