Quale Press -- Opening Arguments by Charles Zerby

Opening Arguments
by Charles Zerby

ISBN: 0-9700663-7-6
Saddle-stitched, $6.00
2003
5.5 x 8.5 inches, 32 pages
POETRY

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The poems of Opening Arguments reveal a world that is both beautiful and diminishing. The natural world stubbornly stands ground, though everything else shifts: "once red staying red, / and redly resisiting winter well into winter, / these berries are the hard facts of their bushes." These changes and the resistance to them are not callous, however, for even "[air] is newly vulnerable" in the scope of these poems.

From Opening Arguments...

Opening Arguments

Pebbles let slip
their silver admits
a brown. Granite, trying hard
to keep up, concedes
blue interrupts its gray.
The cosmos proves orange
and pink compatible.

A cardinal flares up.
Low, lying clouds insist
light isn’t in charge.
A gunmetal V of geese
makes a point of leaving
nothing to think about.