How Far?
Marching on the green plain above the river. Marching
toward the river and marching back. Practicing always,
practicing coming to attention and presenting arms after
marching or before marching as we were trying to learn
or remember about love while studying photos of burning
cities, people, one monk in particular who remained sitting
while the flames kept lifting him the way a soldier will try
to lift a dead one back up, back to life, the way love recalled
will try to lift some couple back. We were just kids really.
We were Americans, black, white. We were Asians, Slovak,
Italian, and Poles, all of mixed descent, all at this school
of advanced learning, learning different and new ways to kill,
asking always the same question. How far is the enemy? Whose
answer is the age of all these young men, women. The length
of their names pronounced by family more slowly now.
After
After the winter. After
the body. After it was put into the ground. After
they dispersed with their programs, their long-ago photos, this
after-family, after the years, after all the holidays, laughter and now after
Bibles and talk of the after-life, returning
to her house, after the reception, and after looking
through boxes in the attic’s rafters, after
that, and returning to his own room to sleep
after the long day, long, long after she gave
birth to him, he reaches deep into his pocket to find
a wing of grief, and the wing turns to fire, but the pocket’s wet still
from the ice that melted there.
Mark Irwin’s nine collections of poetry include A Passion According to Green (2017), American Urn: New & Selected Poems (1987- 2014), Tall If (2009), Bright Hunger (2004), and White City (2000). Recognition for his work includes The Nation / Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. His collection of essays, Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry, was published in 2017. His 10th collection of poetry, Shimmer, won the 2018 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry and will be published in 2019. Currently, he is finishing a book entitled Zanzibar: Selected Poems & Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, for which Alain Borer, the French Rimbaud-scholar, wrote a 50-page afterword. Mark teaches for the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and Colorado. Visit him at: www.markirwinauthor.com
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