|
Home |
Dedication |
Editorial |
Submissions |
About Us |
Back Issues |
Contact Us |
Links
|
 |
|
James R. Whitley's poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has
appeared or is forthcoming in several publications, including Mississippi Review, The Oklahoma Review,
Poetry Salzburg Review and Texas Poetry Journal. His first book-length
poetry collection, Immerson, won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and his second collection,
This Is the Red Door, won the Ironweed Press Poetry Prize .
|
Here
We would like only, for once,
to get just where we are already.
-Martin Heidegger
Finally, a plausible theory:
that,
hate it though I do,
this often stygian place—
call it frosted-over afterglow or
unholy event horizon from which
no hope escapes—
is not just where I am,
but where I am meant to be.
And the moon glowers down here.
And the wind wails in vain, all day.
So I’m sliding Guatemalan worry dolls
underneath each extra bed pillow,
hanging dreamcatchers from my bowed ceilings
to capture anything even roughly shaped
like salvation.
And although there is no beach or lake nearby,
I’m distilling some random bits of meaning
from my neighbor’s unsolicited counsel:
Tired swimmer,
with your teary-eyed view of the shore,
don’t give up.
Ah,
so this is what the world looks like
from the epicenter of grief:
all dulled sheen and doubt-stained,
|
Sostenuto
No matter how striking,
how scintillant,
the sound of an aria
after it has been sung
is no sound at all,
is silence actually,
its own type of music.
Is also, in large part,
its definition,
like a reputation—
an afterstory echoing
away from and out into,
the essence of a thing
that is like an ego
wanting to hold its place here,
to leave some shred of itself
in the realized world,
receding from the ear,
as it does,
in noticeably reluctant waves,
each ebbing note
perfectly seasoned
with that elusive spice
the lapidary calls fire.
(What then is the proper key
for longing? And when, finally,
does history come in?)
Even as the drained musicians
pack up to leave, the last
plucked string quivers on,
sweetening the air like
an addicted tongue darting in
and out of an open honey pot.
Still imprisoned
within her cramped
oval of stagelight,
the torch singer voices
her youthful confusion,
What can any of it matter—
bass clef, treble clef,
hemidemisemiquaver—
now that the music has ended?
|
|
The Sweet Breath of Detachment
In hours of bitterness,
I imagine balls of sapphire, of metal.
I am master of silence.
—Rimbaud
In hours of bitterness,
I imagine balls of sapphire,
of metal burnished to showy splendor.
And I fling my wilting body
around the disjointed room
in a manner that some might call dancing,
my arrhythmic spasms:
part fervid juba, part supple jazz,
all desperate energy.
This is how escape comes to me:
as a benison of light slicing triumphantly
through the most stubborn copse,
as an otherwise mum cave
opening its hidden mouth
to exhale a fleeting rush of clarity.
In these all-too-brief moments
of sweetened air
and halcyon seconds,
I am a dizzy dervish shimmying
among the muted colors of fall,
I am the shackled god of detritus and brittle things,
|
|
|
|
| ©
2004-2007 the Dublin Quarterly--to see familiar things with unfamiliar eyes!
|
|
