If a thrush on a branch is not a sign

← v21n2, Fall 2022

—None of the gurus you knew thought

Blitzkrieg when they awoke from their

Trances, although doesn’t the record of Ignacy Jan

Paderewski keep playing, September 1, 1939,

September 1, 1939, you were never able to put a stop to it?

—Nor have you forgotten Constantine on

The Milvian Bridge across the Tiber, love

Locks now weighing it down, the evening he got

The high sign, and didn’t you remember the tesserae,

Seeing him clean shaven and mosaicked in Hagia Sophia?

—If I had once thought the g in god was as

Silent as it is in sign, and if I thought only fakers

Would say feign instead of fake, or those

Numb with fear of the silent b, can’t I, by

Now, ignore the wrong turn, that passage to dying?

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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