one light series discrete
quick film architecture
love day vs. dead fact
ideas keep things beautiful
ghost living makes
breath something small
the little night within “inside”
blood always / bees nothing
mind the almost dream
red service mean discrete
fire-glass made image-voice
sky much else maybe
weather eye-dark new
hands at air music small
though old, a little book
memory keeps pointing
image made story behind voice
the animals now in space-
time mind’s forest left
another course, flame bodies
must really feel towards
motion, first man less surface
just another architecture
than war-flesh hive-brace
makes the mind’s dog watch
fire’s black winter language
2.
fact makes man’s image
almost instrument even
long sun-sky, country thought
dead toward small sleep
memory earth —inside
architecture’s nightway
black point bodies slow
bees know the body’s
anniversary discrete
blood white enough maybe
rather without storm music
behind anniversary’s call
the animals less film
than hand, mind, put back
nothing around war,
children make ghosts matter
earth’s mind-voice clutter
turn, hear the surface
dream-story, another flesh
something to keep place
away: ghost series, forest
language maybe real glass
things, art, photographs
death-shape behind someone
else day-breath red
water-body forms, else (how)
3.
fact / eye / forest / bees
always just inside, weather
keeps its anniversary
discrete glass animals
little dead really think
the body’s maybe motion
Sleep, winter man
now book backstory
things water makes sprout
put flesh also, films come
through earth, hive rather
know the real ghost
how death forms an image
come vs. never fasten
firestorm’s small music
in the blood-house then
someone sorts love from
memory beautiful view
red enough gets made
inside the mind’s flame-
body its dream instrument
almost breath another now within time left out
even children want things
without living, language
unpricks a snow-black sky
G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.
