Northwest Passage
- Northwest Passage
No ships in this poem, none. No destroyer, one ice-free summer,
passing through the North Pole. No mention of blackbirds,
thousands of them, falling from the Arkansas sky.
No password-protected dungeon where love could flourish.
Nothing, nothing about plums,
awakening, infection. No oceanside barn I “owned”
for three days, no child— waddling after me on the muddy trail
and giggling— I so wanted to adopt;
his hair never glistered, glittered, glinted . . .
No Apocalypse. No moon loitering above the horizon
and therefore huge, golden. No return [End Page 36]
to golden apples, no virgin forest where laurels bend to listen
to imperfectly modulated songs and my loneliness
turns into a live oak and sighs. No bearded man
and no bearded ladies. Nobody home
(love is not ineffable), no lusty surges
(and not unbridled), no bird-of-paradise plumes, nowhere
stockpiles of ginger, sandalwood paste,
no shortcut to you: home, gold
on Spice Islands— no you. No. [End Page 37]
Greg Wrenn’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Yale Review, Pleiades, Boston Review, FIELD, and other publications. His chapbook, Off the Fire Road, published in 2009 by Green Tower Press, features a long poem about a man who travels to Brazil to be surgically transformed into a centaur. He is currently a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.
