Clear

After eight days of rain
what isn’t overwritten
under sun. These

asphalt cracks
pushed further apart.
Eight days without

definition: gray walled
the room in, and I
thought I found a way

to stop thinking—to allow
gray to become a sound
I couldn’t hum myself out of.

All I heard was a window.
A long weed beat
unevenly against it.

Copyright © 2017 Joseph Massey. Reprinted with permission of the author. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 28, 2016 by the Academy of American Poets.

Joseph Massey is the author of Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014) and Illocality (Wave Books, 2015), as well as many chapbooks and various limited-edition broadsides and folios.His work has also appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Nation, A Public Space, American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West; and in the anthologies Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015), and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Belknap Press, 2016).He lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts.