Blackbird Archive
← v15n2, Fall 2016
Poetry · Volume 15, Number 2

River Bytham

G.C. Waldrep

1

by practice of the commandment

the naked attachment of the will

(but, in the mind, each Zion)—

played first by fresh, then by salt, only then by blood

I seize your harp

& dendrochronologies, their variable apparels

the flood

recedesmerely glacial, a Babylon

hands wet from fishing in deep water

catching everything in nets, except that vanquished music

2

a forced march

through saint- and gale-infested quarrylands

Neither is it fundamentally apparent

on an organismic scale:

the nerves, the damaged cords, the ear’s

membrane (metaphorical drum) hitched not to the anvil

but

the great fissures—

“These are the witnesses that reach everywhere,”

elm, ash, oak, birch, alder, pine

(the blood’s inhabitants,its Ararat)

naturehistoryreligionplace
GW
G.C. Waldrep

G.C. Waldrep’s newest books are the long poem, Testament (BOA Editions, 2015), and the chapbook, Susquehanna (Omnidawn, 2013). He co-edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012) with poet Joshua Corey. His poems have appeared in Poetry , New England Review , Ploughshares , and elsewhere. He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania., where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as an Editor at Large for The Kenyon Review.