EDWARD MAYES, "UNTIL JUST SECONDS AGO, IF I MISSPOKE" (ISSUE 14)

UNTIL JUST SECONDS AGO, IF I MISSPOKE

Until just seconds ago, if I misspoke
And if I now stand corrected, or
An understanding finally of rain, as

If all the many deaths were the hailstones
That hit the olive trees last June, a histogram
Of death, a moment between stet and

Everyone else in a hurry, someone’s
Clamor trumping someone else’s clamor,
The clumsiness of something as simple

As night fall, into a day not unbroken,
And if it’s a sleep we can’t speak
About, the gnat clouds that try to lose

Their g’s, or to say the t in hatch, or would
That be a blot on one’s escutcheon, a drip
Of fresh red paint on the architrave, what

Warning, what bells rang in the shtetls, and
If we all are a bad batch, proof of the existence
Of bad gods, the kind that glitch, the kind

That botch, and us, apostatic and eldritch,
Seeing more glass through the glass, an armistice
Only for an instant, wet and worried and worn.


Until nearly daybreak night fell; steed, stud, arrest, instant, understand, static,
prostitute, insist, ecstasy, system; stage, stance, stanch, stanchion, stanza, stet,
circumstance, constant, cost, distant, extant, oust, restharrow; stalag, shtetl, apostasy,
switcheroo, bedstead, armistice (arm-stopping), solstice (sun-stopping); epistyle,
architrave; steer, stern; apostrophe; Pär Fabian Lagerkvist, Nobel Prize 1951

ABOUT THE POET

Edward Mayes’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals and magazines, including The Southern Review, The New Yorker, APR, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, Agni, Harvard Review, and others. His books of poetry include First Language (Juniper Prize, University of Massachusetts Press) and Works and Days (AWP Prize in Poetry, University of Pittsburgh Press). Edward lives in Hillsborough, NC and Cortona, Italy with his wife, the writer Frances Mayes. Their latest collaboration is The Tuscan Sun Cookbook (Clarkson Potter).

ABOUT THE SOUND OF SUGAR

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