Dispatch From Wyoming
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Dispatch From Wyoming
–Green River, Cora, Wyoming
Old poet on leave from a vexed nation's secondLeast populous state, I'm here in the first.How would I think myself other than common,Whatever my so-called distinctions back east?
I'm less than one of the sparkles of foamIn these Wyoming rapids, so white I can see themBy night, which shows more stars than at home,Stars to rob speech. How might anyone fathom
Such millions on millions? A person could readBy their shine, but just now I'm not of a moodTo be reading–or not, at least, written words.Not that my silence is meant to construe
My condition out here as truly unpeaceful.It's just that I'm moved to articulate nothing.I hear the lyrics of coyotes calling,And imagine our own in New England: they yodel
Along with the owls. Our brook winks at heavenAnd lilts as well. A good deal to long for:My wife stands quiet, or so I imagine,By a window where lately we stood together
Past dark to watch deer as they browsed our lawn,Against which their bodies glowed pale as ash.Our children are elsewhere these days, far-flung,And their own children too, yet they're still at a reach [End Page 266]
That out here seems slight. We're a small constellationOf which I am hardly the center, and yet–Or is it therefore?–I know what is meantWhen I use the word God, though I wince at how common
A term like that sounds. A more gifted poetWould find rarer words for whatever I'm feeling,Which calls for magniloquence. Maybe it shouldn't,God adequate now for what lies beyond meaning. [End Page 267]
Sydney Lea a former Pulitzer finalist, founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. His thirteenth collection of poems, Here, is due from Four Way Books next year. Likewise, in fall of 2018, Vermont's Green Writers Press will publish The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life, his collected newspaper columns from his years (2011–15) as Vermont Poet Laureate. In summer of '18, Green Writers Press re-issued his collaborative book of essays with former Delaware laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives.
