Category: Jay Wright

“What can I do with this silence, the sovereignty”

Vandal Poem of the Day: March 16, 2020

 by Jay Wright

What can I do with this silence, the sovereignty
expressed in the cantankerous absence of mass
five? Whose clock now rhymes with that of the hummingbird,
engaged with bee balm, three bells gone, literati

of a summer afternoon? Forget that first word,
the Ovidian ratio that ought to pass
through the body’s self-liberation, and then turn
through its own degradation. How extravagant

I have become, a mark on a printed page, such stern
evidence of structure, yet nothing consonant,
nothing given by a rule so inelegant.
from Disorientations: GroundlingsFind more by Jay Wright at the library
Copyright © 2013 Jay Wright

Used with the permission of Flood Editions.

“There is a derelict intention in love,”

Vandal Poem of the Day: February 17, 2020

 by Jay Wright

There is a derelict intention in love,
a chronic fabulation that never sits right.
One, two, or three might be the hour of regress.
Oh, there waits nothing like the distress
such plucked berries reprove;
they get under the skin, read Petrarch through Donne,
all dunable relations too much in hand.
Peter just has found a clever form. Might
his betrayal open sunsets to dawn,
spawn whatever conspiracy
two who have met on a bland
winter evening enflame? How artful
that appears, delinquent and delightful,
a thorough response to a lunacy.
from Disorientations: GroundlingsFind more by Jay Wright at the library
Copyright © 2013 Jay Wright

Used with the permission of Flood Editions.

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