Ochre iii — Blackbird Archive

← v9n2, Fall 2010

We are designed for the moment, writes late

& dying Lowell. Out of the Serengeti trees,

Bipedal we descended to savannah grass:

Taking notice, all eye & larynx.

We lie in wait

& make the kill—a newborn gazelle,

Sliced from its skin with an artless hand ax—

Taking notice of the Alpha Male’s technique.

Now step forward a thousand thousand generations, until

So minutely each face & tuft of hair, each twist of neck

Is hoarded into memory.

Against the limestone

Synapse guides hand, pulsing to release the crimson forms,

Stilled as they bellow, stilled as—to us—they turn.

history art animals

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.