A tireless messenger who runs and runs

← v21n2, Fall 2022

—When was the last time I counted

The horses in their stalls, and did I count

Right, did all the numbers sum up how I felt,

One horse less today, one more gone

Tomorrow, until all that’s left is nothing, stable empty?

—Or could I have had word blindness,

This word shifting the sands of that word,

The world whirled, turntabled, spun

Story, and when I have finished twisting

The fiber into thread, where is the needle, where is its eye?

—Word has it, I’ve been weave and I’ve

Been woof, isn’t it the fabric of the river water

That gets washed, all day in tempo rubato,

Right hand freedom, left hand keeping

Time, run down the clock, all the grace notes falling?

language loss music

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