GREG WRENN
One
Was there purity
of heart?
I can’t say.
Neither can the boulders
we climbed.
We weren’t one flesh
in some walled garden
of calamus and cinnamon––
more like two brothers
after a cataclysm,
bewildered, on separate pallets,
in a high-desert sickbay.
Yes, there was suffering--
I wanted to
understand yours
as my own throat
throbbed. Stars,
the belt of Orion bright
over the mountain,
like wolf spiders’ eyeshine.
Low-flying planes.
Ribbons of cirrus.
Rare yucca trees––
after a hard freeze
they bloom.
157 The Paris-American
Was there purity
of heart?
I can’t say.
Neither can the boulders
we climbed.
We weren’t one flesh
in some walled garden
of calamus and cinnamon––
more like two brothers
after a cataclysm,
bewildered, on separate pallets,
in a high-desert sickbay.
Yes, there was suffering--
I wanted to
understand yours
as my own throat
throbbed. Stars,
the belt of Orion bright
over the mountain,
like wolf spiders’ eyeshine.
Low-flying planes.
Ribbons of cirrus.
Rare yucca trees––
after a hard freeze
they bloom.
157 The Paris-American
Greg Wrenn is the author of Centaur (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). A Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he has received the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and a Stegner Fellowship as well as awards from the Poetry Society of America and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2014, The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book of linked essays about beauty, ocean acidification, and coral reefs. (gregwrenn.com)