Blackbird Archive
← v9n2, Fall 2010
Poetry · Volume 9, Number 2

Ochre i

David Wojahn

Something of us to prove our afterlife.

Hurried with charcoal on the cave wall of Chauvet.

The hands drip ochre; they fumble with the Kodak.

What is your mother’s maiden name, your wife’s

Middle initial? Favorite sport or pet? You have successfully

Changed your password.

The footprints of the cave’s

Last visitor tell us he was ten or twelve.

We know his height—approx. 4’ 3”.

As his pine-pitch torch tapered down, he’d wipe

The ashen top against the cave side, once against an auroch

Once against a cave bear, the way my father would flick

The wavering orange tip of his Lucky Strike

From his lawn chair to the fireflied grass. Our leavings.

The boy crawled lightward,

on his feet the pollen of an Aurignacian spring.

historymortalityart
David Wojahn

David Wojahn is the author of nine collections of poetry, including For the Scribe (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017); World Tree (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Library of Virginia Book Award in Poetry, and the Poets’ Prize; and Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2007 O.B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is also the author of a collection of essays, From the Valley of Making: Essays on the Craft of Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2015). He has received numerous honors and awards: from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Virginia, Illinois, and Indiana Councils for the Arts, among others. Wojahn has taught at a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Alabama, the University of Chicago, the University of Houston, and the University of New Orleans. He is the director of the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University and is also a member of the MFA faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.