Make no sense following each other

← v21n2, Fall 2022

—That day you read about the “nothing

That is not there” and about “the nothing

That is,” did you not want to let fly

The perfectly notched arrow, but not

With the thought of proving something unprovable?

—We were all born in November, you said, once

Novem, the ninth month, mouths open, coming out of

Mutilation into elation, weaving among the land

Mines, the larded goose crisping in the oven,

But what doesn’t mask the scent of new birth?

—Who would you prefer to show yourself to

First after your resurrection, your eyes blazing

In the noose of new light, if you could only escape

From the multitudes, taking your dinner at

The multiplication table, who wouldn’t not want to disappear?

religion 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