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To Feel the Wholeness of the World (Cool Hand Luke)

By Jon Thompson
Poetry•Vol. XXIV No. 2 (Summer 2011)

The sun writes in his Book, a sentence of
heat & light heat & light.

Righteousness in the scald of days.

The grass is singing, to the sling blades swinging, the grass is singing.

To feel the wholeness of the world about you: that’s the only thing.

The only thing, Boss, I just want to move over here move over here.

Here there is no other.

There is among us no element that is not lawless

not the sun, not the men working under the sun, nor the men watching the men who are working under the sun

dying to be free.

Black single-lane highways cut through a God-stricken land like bereavement.

Something shimmering in the heat of a late summer day.

Fields goldsoftened by light.

In the sweatbox, dark hand-me-down minutes.

Somewhere: wind whispering through trees. A black-ribboned coolness. Moonlight.

Jon Thompson teaches at North Carolina State University, where he edits the international, online journal Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and the single-author series Free Verse Editions. He is the author of The Book of the Floating World and After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing. The poems published in this issue are from a work-in-progress reflecting on landscapes in American film.

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