Rumination
Jane Huffman | Poetry
If I stopped for a moment even, even
for a moment, I would not start again —
like breathing — no, I fear, I should say, fear —
I fear I would not start again — and it is fear
that keeps me up, suspended like an apple
in my mind when someone tells me to picture
it: an apple on your fingertip. Rumination,
as a cow does, ultimately sustained by it.
(As a cow does, ultimately made of grass,
sustained by it, and thus an allegory for,
a standing in, the thing she eats. The grass
grows up and on in her. She stands in it.
The part is a container for the whole.
Strokes of grass become the cud, the soul.)
Jane Huffman is the author of the poetry collection, Public Abstract, winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. She is a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.