Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Redshift

There were other signs; trees burning
through summer.  The sky red
and the lake.  Below the bedroom window
a dead swallow and the forsythia
ashen.                                    Already I have

translated these into the infinite- 
a kind of braille, known
to the fingers-the endless
split and divide
of cells.  Without scale.

It was as with the any body:
we turn against the altar,
stand spinning as the sun loosens
its hold, unfolding the sky.

This is the sky that we find: blue
recast by each new star.  Cerulean.
Cerulean.  It is the light falling
that the swallow moves through- 
part passenger, part passing.  We breathe,
are breathing.  No end.

Body of the Crime

She sharpens the silver
and folds the napkins into white
scarecrows.  On the table rice paper unrolled.
A pestle of fine china
to grind pigment to ink.

Her back bent to pull the crocus up
from the ground, she gardens as if
she were graveside.  Fills each hole
with a diagram of fire.  Thinks
of a dark suit:  the beautiful graveclothes.
The tulips in a range of blue and purple
burn into the earth and terrace.

Let the record reflect:
smoke rising up.  The mesquites
stained with a pale violet.

Joni Wallace grew up in Moab, Utah, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. She obtained her J.D. from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from the University of Montana. She was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship by the Arizona Commission on the Arts in 1999. She currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.
"Redshift" and "Body of the Crime" were published in Joni Wallace's Redshift (Kore Press, 2001).