Edenic
- Edenic
We named you the hereafter, the husk,flag of an unpeopled country.
We declaimed your embattled heights,a scarlet halo there for the basking
and you would be a hymn tornfrom the hymnal, you singly.
Call us back from names, from naming.River is no river’s aspiration
not even in that first fallingsleep, the great mirror, ease
in the floral bower, and thoughyou speak driftingly
of nascence, of flames, you heednot these human beatitudes.
We are what follows our lives, tugand collar, and the waters we’ve crossed
are slackened, poised. None go further.It’s no longer raining and the rain hasn’t stopped.
We’ve simply walked to the end of it. [End Page 143]
Timothy O’Keefe is the author of The Goodbye Town, winner of the Field Poetry Prize. His poems and lyric essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, New American Writing, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. He’s from New Jersey and lives in Georgia.
