G.C. Waldrep

first person

draw the empty frames
from their hope chest
(the folded gray uniform
long gone to dust)

wreathed in ash
I fletch the sky’s reed-sister
as if all human
wrongs were never-
helmsmen, never-priests

on Mount Monadnock
I tested the berries
(sweet in summer: True)
against flesh’s flame

the body’s silver specie
a music in my mind
ghost-music, -specie
can’t be your mirror, I
cheats death again

the root & its entourage
ark-in-the-forest,
zither-      lit & -strung

don your ghost-uniform
muster me in cyme-
light, marrow-light,
unbide my tender service

untitled (specimen dowry)

Pearl pearl be my docent—

the green wedge
attests—&, the singing cleat—

I have many secret debts—

The human body is a system—

the dream sweeps
through, & puts music away—

my life in the great courts

 

*

to address the least durable moment—
trace-protection
a mythos conferred, heavy gender
weighting the forest’s punctum—

faith’s
     same four notes in the understory—

manna

shelter-vessel, the medulla’s gray star

      the copper pit in which I face you
shifts aside, lobed with the literal—

extraction’s logic: adduce vs adjourn
—my tasting-garment, fragrant hyphae

stoop to murmur        in flood of thee

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are a long poem, Testament (BOA Editions, 2015), and a chapbook, Susquehanna (Omnidawn, 2013). With Joshua Corey he edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012). His new collection, feast gently, is due out from Tupelo Press in 2018. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.