Carolyn Oliver, featured in the new Ocean State Review

Letter to the Apprentice Jeweler

Lately I’ve been feverish, prickly hot
and sleepless. None of this work feels like mine,

it’s peculiar, mute as some substance
drawn unwilling from the dark holds of earth

and sea. Or deeper places. You, fist full
of after-hours glitter, know what I mean.

Tell me, given what’s rarely given (time,
gold), what you’d make yourself. Opal bangles

cool on your scorched forearms, arrows to thread
through your ear? Would you be tempted

by intricacy, enamel inlays,
or by the baroquest of pearls? Perhaps

you’d rather craft portents, unwearable:
figureless landscapes, fallow topaz fields

under a sun poached to prasiolite
and brittle onyx furring garnet seas—

but then the new door would chime, the owner’s
old schnauzer would yip, insist that you stop,

rush up the stairs to polish stones and small
talk, and then return to find your fire out—

I know that feeling, bitter like olives
just combed from the tree, which is why I leave

my questions always swallowed: Is the weight
of the gold dust you’ll inhale today at least

as heavy as a caught moth’s hindwings?
Does soldering or unmelding offer

you more comfort? Last winter in the shop
you swept a welder’s mask over the slope

of your copper hair—or have I, all sweat
and wandering slow shiver, confused you

with a glassmaker? Forgive my error,
forgive me my strangeness, forgive me, please,

these interruptions. I’m getting better
by the day, I know it, soon I’ll be well

enough to meet you at the museum,
I’ll be as placid as the glass flowers

you came to see. If there’s time, if your work
allows—I promise not to speak—we’ll slip

deeper, I’ll show you creatures out of dreams
chosen for a fragile kind of saving:

orgulant medusa bells, nautilus
logics, tigrine mollusk shells. Imagine

cupping the glossy clink of them, like ice
suspended inside your flickering fists.

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024) and Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize). Her most recent chapbook is Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023; selected for the Rane Arroyo series). Born in Buffalo and raised in Ohio, she now lives in Massachusetts.