- To Eat the Awful While You Starve Your Awe
To eat the awful while you starve your awe, to weasel misery like a suck of egg,
to be ebullience’s prick and leak, a character pinched to characteristic,
hell-relisher, persimmon-sipper, sad Tom, sane Tom, all day licking the cicatrix where your Tomhood lay. [End Page 27]
CHRISTIAN WIMAN is the author, editor, or translator of ten books, including Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems (FSG, 2016), My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (FSG, 2013), and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (HarperCollins/Ecco, 2012).