Witness Magazine

Nor Any Know I Know the Art

By
Poetry•Vol. 34 No. 2

by Edward Mayes

 

The question is how can you get the temporary
To last longer, finger food, ur-language scrawled
On an original wall, everyone read it, everyone
Jumped into the first fire, those who have
Forgotten how to say the rosary in the rose
Garden, or in the orto where the apples are
Applauding the oranges for being both fruit
And color, the day you opened the armoire and
Found the still-warm armadillos, something you
Wouldn’t admit to anyone, sloughing off
Unsuccessfully your aristocracy, crazy with moony
Lunatics, you said pass me the piece of resistance,
Flexed and flummoxed, like taking the copter
Away from the helicopter, or the costume jewelry
You wore with or without your bathing suit,
And you wouldn’t say it’s naïveté that made
You pause at the word Brontë, do you say it
Like Rilke said it, or the grey parrot Tom and
Claire carried back from Africa, with its foul
Language, and the noise of the body shop it
Lived near, you passed on the beaker of warm
Piss, summer humming along, dodging the poison
Sumac, whipped by nettles, artemisia by any
Other name is mugwort and mugwort by any
Other name is wormwood and you can’t
Remember that glass of absinthe circa 1982,
Like an ostrich looking for oysters in all the wrong
Places, getting rid of the riddle, the hatred,
The red hat, gushing with more gushing than
Has every been gushed before, if you know
What you mean, adorned with harmony and
Mimesis, it’s art that won’t allow you to forget.
*A line from poem 381, “I cannot dance opon my Toes,” The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Edited by R. W. Franklin

 

 

Edward Mayes’s books of poetry include First Language, To Remain, Magnetism, Works and Days, Speed of Life, and Bodysong. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Poetry. His books have received the Juniper Prize, the Gesù Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award, and the Associated Writing Programs Prize. He’s also received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award and Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. He lives in North Carolina and Cortona, Italy, with his wife, writer Frances Mayes.

 

 

 

Witness blends the features of a literary and an issue-oriented magazine to highlight the role of the modern writer as witness to his or her times. Launched in Detroit in 1987, the magazine is best known for showcasing work that defines its historical moment; special issues have focused on political oppression, religion, the natural world, crime, aging, civil rights, love, ethnic America, and exile. The issues “New Nature Writing,” “The Sixties,” “Sports in America,” and “The Best of Witness, 1987 – 2004” eventually appeared as university press anthologies. In 2007, Witness moved to Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The magazine publishes one print issue and one online issue a year, and increasingly seeks out work that contextualizes the American experience by highlighting issues of global concern.