The true meaning, ready to be decoded

← v21n2, Fall 2022

—Although I seemed unsteady in the parking

Lot, it was the period at the end of

The sentence I seemed to have stumbled

Over, thinking isn’t there a comma missing somewhere,

Should we pause now, isn’t being born once enough?

—In the purse I found on the street,

Ready money and a photograph of

A fallow horse, but no other clue

To identity, even for identity’s sake,

Have we had enough with perished, we’ve thought?

—You rode all through that renaissance,

Quasi-imaginary light, you felt forgotten

But not forgiven, and I felt that the already-

Dead weren’t paying attention, even to

The stellar darkness, am not, are too, am not, are too.

mortality language identity

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