Leap Day Birthday
Today, a bright one in February,
sun made it down almost the whole way
into the courtyard. Knucklebones of tiny trees.
Arc of shadow on brick and glass
as something enormous comes near, and
decides to withdraw, peering out of the
vertiginous blue, as it does sometimes.
No, the off-years are better,
the feeling something’s special, different, but the clue only
no worry that it means anything
that it will be solved, going from prologue
to epilogue all at once, a better marker this
absence, this instant of midnight which ingests
a day’s vanishing, this invisible hummingbird,
which alights on my life for an instant and is gone.
Adam Scheffler grew up in California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD in English from Harvard. His first book of poems – A Dog’s Life – was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the 2016 Jacar Press Book Contest. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Plume, Barrow Street, Antioch Review, Sewanee Review, Verse Daily, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and many other venues. He teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program.
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Vallum: Contemporary Poetry 