Jeanne Wagner
The Conjurer

The German for “eyeball” or “pip,” literally “the apple of the eye”

the world
globes around our eyes
like blown glass
each day’s hard green brightness
hanging in its own light
a telescoped moon

the apple in the garden
the pomegranate
what is it we’re not supposed to know
can’t return from unchanged

is it how we enter the world
only through hunger
something held
its weight in the hand
the touch of cool skin
taut with its own certitude
the apple taste
of woven air and water

we reach the core
holding between our fingers
the woody axis of the stem
around its center
a constellation of seeds
hard and black
as the eyes of birds
our mouth made lidless
with its hunger

and awakened into flight.

*

A native of San Francisco, Jeanne Wagner studied German at the University of California and received a Masters Degree in Humanities from San Francisco State University. She began writing seriously in 1996 and has since published in many literary magazines including Quarterly West, Atlanta Review, Poet Lore and The Southern Poetry Review. She was the recipient of the 1998 Writers’–at–Work Fellowship, the 2000 Frances Locke Award, and more recently, the McGuffin Poet Hunt. Her full length manuscript, The Zen–Pianomover, will be published in 2004 as part of the Stevens Manuscript Award. For her day job, she is a tax accountant specializing in professional athletes. When she isn't working on tax forms or writing poetry, she likes to watch old movies and travel.

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