SURVIVAL IS A STYLE
There are no knives
on the man so thin the wind
whips his cargo pants around him like a dance
to which his bones aspire,
no flares, no smoke, no unmetaphorical fire
when the woman in the camouflage jog bra
jogs by whistling all the while.
Survival is a style.
TO EAT THE AWFUL WHILE YOU STARVE YOUR AWE
To eat the awful while you starve your awe,
to weasel misery like a suck of egg,
to be ebullience’s prick and leak,
a character pinched to characteristic,
hell-relisher, persimmon-sipper, sad Tom, sane Tom,
all day licking the cicatrix where your Tomhood lay.
DRIVE, 1982
There is no new thing under the sun
but the ever-reviving lives our losses foster,
like the white-bloused girl wading cotton north of Dunn
who looked up the moment that I lost her.
SUMMER RIVER ROSIE DAM
The old bitch Rosie ambles up the drive.
The taut knobs of her teats nearly touch the dust.
Somewhere something needs her.
Chunk-necked, long-bodied, lug-legged, smudge-colored.
She abhors brooms but otherwise endures
insults, indifference, novice efforts to leash or clean.
A kind of commanding obedience about her:
as long as it takes you to see, she waits.
Then, with a sort of conspiratorial shiver and eons in her eyes,
lugs her nubs up the porch steps and sighs loudly down
as if she’s been deflated.
A ghost of must and an orbit of fleas,
one toothed ear and two bonus toes.
Nothing culminates in her.
She is the opposite of frolic.
Her sleep is an extinction.
However, should an afternoon prove overlong, heat
smite, one’s pleasures pall,
should one let slip the one word she knows
(Rosie is a rune to her, one more blurt from the blurters)
she’s up! all frisk and ripple, sniffing existence anew,
and with her tail pronged as a warthog saunters
down the steps, across the yard, parting the tall grass ahead of you
toward the roar.
EATING GRAPES DOWNWARD
Every morning without thinking I open
my notebook and see if something
might have grown in me during the night.
Copyright © 2020 by Christian Wiman