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This Gentle Surgery

By Malachi Black Malachi Black

Once more the bright blade of a morning breeze

glides almost too easily through me,

and from the scuffle I’ve been sutured to

some flap of me is freed: I am severed

like a simile: an honest tenor

trembling toward the vehicle I mean

to be: a blackbird licking half notes

from the muscled, sap-damp branches

of the sugar maple tree . . . though I am still

a part of any part of every particle

of me, though I’ll be softly reconstructed

by the white gloves of metonymy,

I grieve: there is no feeling in a cut

that doesn’t heal a bit too much.

Source: Poetry (November 2009).

Biography

Malachi Black is the author of Storm Toward Morning (forthcoming 2014 by Copper Canyon Press), and two limited edition chapbooks: Quarantine (2012) and Echolocation (2010). A recipient of a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Black has also received recent fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the University of . . .

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