Neither Leaven nor Honey by Fire

Abstract

Neither Leaven nor Honey by Fire G.C. Waldrep (bio) A distant mourning—my mother's argumentwith time dreams it slinks from tree to treein the orchard, gaffing, grafting, splinting scionsonto resistant stock, their hopeless patrolwounded with starlight's merciless talc.The porcelain bed cracks in its debt of spineas one might have expected, really—theftbeing, of course, a limited, advance engagementnot subject to Empire's spasms, its piacularrecrudescence, turtled hives adrifton the midnight floodwaters. Ruin makes usknow the names others call us, the nonhumanothers, e.g. stones, bacteria, ghosts.Someone lights a fire. I have spent the lastof my uncles' violence on this box of paints.That the door in my dreams always appearsas dark wood, bound in iron, is immaterialin the strictest sense. Oh vein, I cannot touchyou, you are so near. It's true, the sunis alarming when seen from space, orfrom inside music's chipped, acrylic mug.It won't hurt long is what I actually sayto her, my mother, to anyone, are you listening,froth of rye in the spring fields—my fatheris, after all, still living, poured out like wet ashonto some beaten ground, Elgar's panegyricto Nashville and every useful art. What we haveleft is our mutual love of flame rather than,say, mirrors, which we use to signalothers, my mother for instance, this, yes, thiswas the flesh, let it shudder and cauterize,hem and stoke. Such is the legible confession.We will be clothed with daughters elsewhere. [End Page 9] G.C. Waldrep G.C. Waldrep's most recent books are The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021) and feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University. Copyright © 2021 Pleiades and Pleiades Press