According to rule. The terrible safeguard
of the text when placed against the granite
ledge into which our industry inscribed
itself. We were prying choice from the jaws
of poverty, from the laws of poverty.
But what came out was exile. Safety,
is it serious or unserious, I mean as aspiration?
It’s not tangible the way the wild ginger
is tangible, the way the bloodroot is tangible.
The beckoning armature of stone-in-stone,
a fire birth paraphrases. Not a prophecy
although it labors like one, back bent,
into the coal seam. You can’t see its face.
Perhaps after all it has no face left to see.
Multiple worlds comply in the event
that is my hand, the thin loam cast up
against desertion’s flank. We were creating
a brief for recognition, although we didn’t
know this yet. I take my pulse, I calculate
the pain in my left shoulder, my right leg.
Safety, a sign no one has taken away yet,
an arch through which our futures crept.
Voids are uncanny though we bleed in them,
necessitating the oxygen of forms and their
variants. The breath I take, like my pulse,
an ample rhythm that captures the known
inside the unknown. Possession, intangible
though it passes through my hand, it stages
its shift in authenticity. Night’s body,
on the autopsy table for all to view. The bats
unfurling from the drift-mouth at dusk,
co-aspirators, co-appetitive: they calculate
my presence with their aversive echoes.
I can feel the blame taking hold, but it has
another name in this place, one it keeps secret.
I rest my thought against it, the beauty
of the now I’ve squandered. How it chases
our mothers and fathers into perfect elegy.
G. C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Earliest Witnesses; and The Opening Ritual. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University.
