David Wagoner

A Love Poem While Dissolving

I’m trying to say I love you, but Buckminster Fuller declared

there are no straight lines in the universe, which was bad enough,

but he also claimed, and he was supposed to know, there are no surfaces

and no solids, and if that’s true, and of course it is, what I’m standing on

while looking at you what I thought was straight in the eye is neither

here nor there nor capable of being solved by the most solid geometry,

and every upper layer of  everything is no longer a member

of any anything, but a simple particle of low, medium, and high

exchanges of views, depending momentarily on the opinions

of some observers like you or me whose eyeballs are undergoing

a temporary impression of what we’ve called edges and outlines

in a whirl of circles, which aren’t really cycles, but spirals

headed somewhere either under or around us or in and out

of what’s called (for the unstable love of us!) what have you,

and what I seem to have of you is a higher and higher opinion.

Author: David Wagoner

David Wagoner has published 19 books of poems, most recently After the Point of No Return, (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).  He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991, six yearly prizes from Poetry, two yearly prizes from Prairie Schooner, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011.  In 2007, his play First Class was given 43 performances at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for 23 years.  He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002, and he is professor emeritus of English at the U. of Washington.  He teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop.

Plume: Issue #21 March 2013