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

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)

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  Next week's poet:

 Colin SchmidtJJCCCACc