Jared Carter

Silverpoint

Still the most delicate of ways
          to coax the ground
To yield to figure. Lines of gray
          melt into brown,

Grow warmer — after weeks and months,
          a strange rebirth
Of elemental marks. What once
          could not assert

Itself by shining, now becomes
          what matters, here
Where shadows come and go, among
          lines turning clear.

Jared Carter’s most recent book of poems, The Land Itself, is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia.  He lives in Indiana.