A word wakened by lips that perish

← v21n2, Fall 2022

—I dreamt I pulled a word

Out of the water, I had hooked it,

It was bloodied and oddly bent,

And so that’s where I got my

Irony, I heard myself say, and then I woke up.

—Didn’t I awaken late and didn’t I

Take the bus to the beach, or when I

Read Emily Dickinson while getting my smog

Check, the radio on to something, visible

Turbulence all around me, and me keeping watch?

—Haven’t we all pretended to greenness,

Lobes and spadices and spathes, the jack-in-the-

Pulpit spouting shibboleths, or when the action swerves,

The verbs turn pro, my blind grandfather used the clothesline

As his guide, yet another way to abandon our lives?

language memory

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