Poem of the Week

Brocken Specter

Temperance Aghamohammadi

Where with wherewithal.

I fixed my eye. On some

underdark peak. Rain sharpened

in white fangs. Mist

forked into glittering.

Tongues. Made fluttering

tunes. Was errant.

In my wandering. I.

Left alone. I.

Ate nothing. Drank

nothing. Spied violet

berries. Beaked

from branches.

How long. Was I

there. In the shroud.

Of that mountain. False

sun seething. Even in dark.

Where in the distance.

A walker walked. With

me. Ambling limbs.

An apparition. Weaving

in and out. Of the light.

Familiar. And strange.

I knew then. I am

my own nothing.

A shadow. Cascading

within. Shining particles

of mist. And in the distance.

A half-fox blazed. Across

the absences of grass.

It had my face. It spoke.

So softly. And insistently.

Saying. It was. What.

I was. It was saying.

The Yale Review · “Brocken Specter” by Temperance Aghamohammadi

how did this poem begin for you?

“Brocken Specter” came after months of studying modern Irish poetry with the brilliant Guinn Batten. The figure of the spéir-bhean (in Irish vision poems, a woman from the other realm with connections to land, country, and Eros) possessed me until I became her; I had a series of waking dreams in which I projected myself into a psychological and geographic terrain of mysticism and mercuriality. The first line I wrote was “I am nothing but my own shadow,” which soon transmuted into “I am my own nothing,” and the rest of the lines immediately followed. This poem is both the beginning and the end of a quest. It is a Brocken specter, a shadow that takes a miraculous form—a me that is not me.

Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. An Iranian American poet, medium, and critic, she is the author of BATTALION SHAPED GIRL. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New England Review, Passages North, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.