Courtney Druz / poetry
Endurance in Endurance
Midway through, the counting lost all sense:
numbers were—well…words touched and whirled off
and the parquet extended infinitely in all directions.
I found myself alone in an old song
asked to dance by a slow radio wave
from an era where such things were done.
Lines blur where shadows traverse reflections
beneath me on the wood as I step back,
left back, side, slide together, promenade.
from The Doorkeeper’s Gate
She brought him to the house of NAME in Shiloh.
It was a window laid flat, with walls of stone and a roof made of curtains.
Always there is one who brings you and one who waits for you there.
Sometimes there are choristers or guards; sometimes you are assigned those duties.
Always you must take note of what you see.
*
Start with the fundamentals. What do you remember?
Gray clouds passing in front of a gleaming moon. Like some movies I saw, but either faster or slower.
Good. That will do. And how did it make you feel?
I worried about the lack of synchronization. How the poetry was not transmitted.
7
The machines look inside the machines look inside the machines, and on each ragged edge another ragged edge, a defect.
The mother swallowed the nanoparticles and the infant assembled the camera in the womb with a little difficulty, a ship in a bottle.
She came out with lots of pictures but neglected to use the flash.
Can you reconstruct the sequence in reverse?
One of the black shots is a perfect likeness of the first dot.
Awww…
What should we call it?
8
A name!
So obvious, uncontroversial.
I don’t know what you’re talking about but I agree with you.
Existence carves away possibility, columns sky between these buildings.
Poor David, stuck all twisty in the marble.
Those Tadpoles
Pollywog wiggle-heads, double-living wrigglers,
muffle-sensed and dumb as fish they squirm
spermoid from the jelly-mass of eyeballs
we spawn. Don’t be disturbed by our consciousness
or their own collective lack. Believe that everything
is straining towards it, that all beings have a niche
in the broader ecosystem. Believe, if you wish,
that nothing which survives is gasping in dry gas.
Admire the fluid breathers. Don’t think about us frogs,
two-timing bounders, lecherous for water on the pores,
croaking our lust-calls in their poignant amniotic pond
where eggless they encapsulate legless progress.
All complex natural processes are irreversible.
They soft-boned whips, we fuse-boned springers,
they peeled-egg eyes of the wide field, prey,
we poly-lidded predators, wide-mouthed,
they black apostrophes small as flies
on our long pink tongues—content to become us.
We jump and fall, dive and rise;
reptiles and birds have passed us by—we hop
fractionally to the unattainable element.
Courtney Druz holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from Brown University and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has published poems in many journals and received honorable mentions in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg and the Reuben Rose poetry competitions. She lives in Israel.
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© 2026 Courtney Druz