7/24/2015

Axis Mundi

Published on Academy of American Poets (http://www.poets.org)

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Axis Mundi
Where in the church of the mind,
the minds sawn down trees,
where hardwoods stacked up,
quartered and milled where under the nave
the painting is placed,
in the left-hand side aisle,
the viewpoint from which one approaches the altar
do the putti recover us and give us wings?
The figures are over life size,
their heart beats thump through the church
in the direction of the brushstroke,
drift at the edge of fields left to the shape it takes.
Sometimes its rain the reach of rain.
Sometimes its purer, less mixed. Jubilance.
I feel it running down the hill in the rain
running so as not to get wet but getting wet.
Pause to tie my shoelace,
as if, tying it, I might actually pull togetherfinding it undone.
Credit:
Copyright 2015 by Harriet Levin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 23, 2015, by the
Academy of American Poets.
About this Poem:
I wrote Axis Mundi when I was going for a run while in residence at the Vermont Studio Center
and it started to rain. Rain saturated me, but also it was my experience of being isolated and
alone in a new place. I wrote the whole poem in my headwhich accounts for its short stanzas
and its division into strophe and antistrophe. I write most of my poems in my head, running, like
this one, or walking around or even while Im driving which I think results in a more simple form
and, of course, in more repetition, because I have to memorize the poem word by word as I go
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7/24/2015

Axis Mundi

along.
Harriet Levin
Author:

Harriet Levin

Harriet Levin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to first-generation Eastern European

Jewish immigrants. She received her BA in English and Russian at Temple University and her
MFA from the University of Iowa, where she also translated works for writers in the International
Writing Program.
Read more
Date Published:
2015
Source URL: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/axis-mundi

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