David Wojahn

Borges at Dolphin Books: New Orleans, 1982

He props his cane between Maps & True Crime,

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His left hand on the shoulder of Senorita X,

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His red-haired bereted assistant; the right strokes the spines

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Of Classics—Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Sextus

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Propertius. O consider how his light is spent

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& now he has become that book read only

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In the dark, in the turbid shadows of embabelment,

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The magic lantern long extinguished & the rheumy

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Confounded eyes are the surface of a gasoline-slicked pond,

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Abetted rainbows. Am I walking toward him,

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Or is he walking through me, the almost incorporeal hand

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shadowing through my own more slowly disappearing palm?

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I hold open the door to Royal Street for them.

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Stygian is the August day. She takes his tremoring arm.

Author: David Wojahn

David Wojahn‘s ninth collection of poetry, For the Scribe, was issued in 2017 from the University of Pittsburgh Press. His previous collection, World Tree, was published by Pitt in 2011, and was the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, as well as the Poets’ Prize. The University of Michigan Press released a new collection of his essays on poetry, From the Valley of Making, in 2015. He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in the low residency MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Plume: Issue #98 October 2019