G.C. Waldrep Poems

Half a toy being better than
none. A forest being better than none.
An argot, a pidgin. And the miraculous brevity
...

Things start with fire, or else with music.
Some of us are at the restaurant where the bird got in,
and some of us are elsewhere, and anyway
that was another occasion, some other evening.
...

There is not so much water here as pollen.
A lesson in obedience, in Victorian industry:
I am busy, busy therefore the child will live.
...

To be the son of a poet is to lust in a great circle. Places both of you will
visit, for instance—Iowa cornfield, New England farm midwinter.
A mill-race. Plaque for the bell factory hidden now
...

The earth has a taste for us, in its unknowing
appetite there yet resides a hunger, incompletion
that draws all life to its dark self. What, then,
shall we say of the flesh's own desire, distal
...

I call to you as a prism to its oracle denies any prescriptive allure. What
is a high sound when a sparrow takes it. When breath snatches. A latch
catches. Dear diary. I am home now and affect a suitable disregard.
...

I implore clarity on last time. No noose replies. Sinuous furlongs of
ocean light chitter one to another in the livid estuary. Correlatives
sink. Flensed bodies of seals sink faster, into sand. Think of the gulls as
morticians.
...

In my travel closet the ghosts of autumn are hiding, waiting for a little light to
emerge from one of the smaller countries, the ones you almost never hear about,
that rotate on & off the U.N. Security Council like so many ferial days on a poor
...

I don't believe in your pious Emersonian ecstasies, your wind-clocks & wing
bursaries. Autumn cast a wheel in the foundry summer built but then summer
skipped, bankrupt & disguised in women's clothing. You leave a box of tools by
the roadside and it makes fun of the highway, not the workmen, is one theory:
...

Meanwhile a heart-shaped ice storm hovers over Lamar, Pa. Doppler radar tells
us this much. I promise myself I will not hide from the marionettes anymore.
The monks have lost their monastery: we see them brawling in the synagogues,
cutting loose at the Circle K. Someone has set their marionette on fire. We live
...