Ice glitters like it’s good.
The whole world glitters,
sped toward ends,
we all fall in.

Under the ice is water.
But under the world, between you
and the everything
of your vanishing…

Fire, air, water, and earth
still turning, spilling into each other.
He tuned the world tense,
made the elements restless

so any happiness we might contrive
of fire, or air, or water, or earth
cannot rest, has to reach higher
than earth, water, air, or fire.

It’s all echo—whatever world
keeps calling to you
in the woods, in a rick, a deep wave—
Just a lie that vanishes

as soon as it tricks you inside.
Shut up, go away, say to the world.
And it does—into the woods, a rock,
deep waves that keep calling you.

When the sky’s dark face
catches your eye again,
let memory write
of a darkness beyond this:

days self-blinded, nights
of searching untaught,
thinking your own thought,
light.

Wanting what you fear,
fearing your own desire:
icicles at the heart
form to burn apart.

When, in this cycle
of suffering he signs,
does the martyr being
to suspect himself?

Nate Klug was born in Minnesota and grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He attended Roxbury Latin in West Roxbury, MA (graduated 2004), and went on to study English at the University of Chicago (graduated 2008). He is currently a Master of Divinity student at Yale Divinity School and is a candidate for ordained ministry in the United Church of Christ. His poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Christian Century, Literary Imagination, Poetry, the Yale Review, and Zoland Poetry Annual.

From “Octonaires on the World’s Vanity and Inconstancy” first appeared in the June 2011 issue of “Poetry Magazine”.

Antoine de Chandieu is featured in Edition: Small Wonder