Jane Zwart

Poetry

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. In addition, she is the co-editor of book reviews for Plume; her own reviews have been published there and in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

 

There are so many levels called darkness

my son says. He is steering a rocketeer between Catherine wheels, between spikes and mines. He taps a tablet, his contrail fizzling pink. Well, I, too, have hurtled through the geological strata of darkness: drywall skies; a tenebra that builds, flame by doused flame, wet pinch to crumbling wick; the night navigable only if one trusts to the instruments; the mines only memory will see you through: recollected route, ghost of rusty dusk. The levels called darkness, says my son, you have to tell apart by their songs.

“ My sons are fond of an online game called Geometry Dash; it involves surviving various gauntlets, mostly, but players can also design their own levels, naming them and setting them to music. As they were explaining the game to me, the elder said, ‘There are so many levels called darkness,’ and the sentence felt so much like a proverb that I built a poem around it. ”

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