And if there is no lining to the world

← v21n2, Fall 2022

—God, you said, enough, you said

Enough, you said, and all the branches

Tonight, look black, so, per forza, you

Sit down or having sat down to read

Anacreon again, as well as spilling wine on

—The tablature, mistakes were made, or delayed, like

Iambics littering a dozen accents, and you

Saturnine, unripe peach, hearing outside

F-bombs mugging for the cameras, and they who

Abide, fail, go looking for handcuffs in

—Caesarean sections of the dollar stores, but you will close

Tacitus’s Annals, finding the day-by-day a better bet, one you can’t

Ignore for long, diritto all’oblio, well-noted,

Obelisks ruining themselves in the knot gardens, and there’s

Nothing really left to say about happiness and its end.

language mortality

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