When I die, I will see the lining of the world

← v21n2, Fall 2022

—Wasn’t it your turn, you said, to be

Sensate, you with a wicked cough, and outside

The world in pain again, when your Weltanschauung

Creates your Weltschmerz, and you coming out

Of welter nights, how could you not feel?

—Won’t the perfect match light the perfect

Fire, earth blazed, earth scorched, the last branch

Still alive, holding on? You counted then recounted

And still numbers refuse to add up to

Anything you would care to praise.

—The riverbanks that line the river you

Can’t get across: if you were the messenger,

What message would you have memorized, relining

The chests of drawers in the hallway, what kind of

Sentence, isn’t that a new way to try to begin?

mortality language

Edward Mayes

Edward Mayes is the author of five books of poetry including Works and Days (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), winner of the Associated Writing Programs Prize for Poetry, and First Language (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), winner of the Juniper Prize. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review , The Best American Poetry , The Gettysburg Review , Harvard Review , The Kenyon Review , The Massachusetts Review , The New Yorker , The Southern Review , and Poetry , among others. He is also the coauthor, with his wife Frances Mayes, of three books about Tuscany: In Tuscany (Broadway Books, 2000), Bringing Tuscany Home (Broadway Books, 2004), and The Tuscan Sun Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2012). Mayes is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and both the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award and the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He previously served as the director of the creative writing program at Santa Clara University. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and Cortona, Italy. Photo by Steven Rothfeld