What was incomprehensible will be comprehended

← v21n2, Fall 2022

—Would you have understood house

If the final e had been pronounced,

Would that have been the scree of

Speech or the spree of speech, what were

You watching from the bleachers, what chain reaction?

—Was it you who pleached the willow

Branches, arbor for all of us, shade for

The tea carts, teacup full of sorrow for

Something lost, sun so treacherous today,

Makes you underreact, saw, was, saw, was.

—You called but whomever it was you called

Was unreachable, but we all have our right

To our own oblivion, another word for

Sleep, the worn daybed on the porch still wet

From dew, your kind of prison, wouldn’t you guess?

language grief

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