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

Ochre xxv

David Wojahn

My eyes don’t dream, though surely my brow feels

Something remote. Shut lips.

Can you penetrate

This reticence, this sorrow that admits no smile,

Only shadow. On my lap the medic’s helmet,

Scarred & pitted, white oval for the scarlet cross,

Washed-out colors, fingers toying with the strap.

The wrists, which won’t stay folded for the pose,

Are milk-white blurs, as if only my hands could grasp

The details of such inwardness. This time, no caption,

And the ringless hands will open and clench.

Hands & eyes averted, the image beckons

Then pushes you away.

It haunts your desk.

I stare into the glass, your breath against his face

Until our images dissolve—shadow into light, son into father.

warfamilymemory
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.