So if you love me you will tolerant Be of the nature that is with me sent. I cannot be a different thing although For your sake, to win you, I would grow Wings and shed thorns, Be weed, or newly born, Anything so to please you, But I'm myself and cannot ease you.
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Recorded for Poem-a-Day, December 11, 2017
Exhibit 1
Start with a base map, unlabeled terrain, in shaded green and ochre, nude relief, cool continental mass bathing in blue, a face whose features now are visible, unannotated, apolitical, as if a mighty snow had settled here and muffled every static line and letter, earth as naked as the moon, but full of lively color, from the fissured west into the placid belly of the country, eastward over quartzite ridge, carbonate valley into southwest-trending s-curves up the coast, a range two thousand miles, two hundred fifty million years of mountain formed in three successive waves of rock uplifted and depressed, and in the west it’s just begun. Nine hundred million acres under time, under stress and stretches of content. Reserved for a duration. Blue-green grid of constant revolution.
Copyright © 2017 by Susan Barba. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 11, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2017 by Susan Barba. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 11, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

Susan Barba
Susan Barba is the author of the poetry collection Fair Sun (David R. Godine, 2017).