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Steve Myers

Epilogue

Explore more of Steve Myers work in the new PDF pamphlet Once There Was a Way from Buttonhook Press.

Moon and morning star. I walk outside, front lawn
sown with seed pods from the sweetgum, bend,
and pick one up,
.                            pocked, spiky, a dried-out sphere
weaponized.
.                      Death device: a mace,
.                                                             medieval German
Morgenstern, or, bobbing on the surface of my hand,
a naval mine.
.                      A pint-sized sputnik,
.                                                          ultrastuctural
morphology of spines surrounding a virion,
.                                                                        as a corona…

Language…has created the word ‘solitude’ to express
the glory of being alone, —that’s Tillich talking,
from his bone-box in New Harmony. True, sometimes
—possibly—
.                      but I’ll take Rilke’s love your solitude
and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering
it causes you —the “both/and,” the whole yin/yang—
in his fourth letter to a young man far from home.

As, for example, my friend Dan, his singing school
Kensington, North Philly, among the huffers, hookers,
and abandominiums, the El-train telling him home
is where your clothes are.
.                                             Thirty years since my father
last wore this flannel shirt. I hear Erykah singing
“Time’s a Wastin’.”

.                                Isn’t every straitened body a
sundial,
.             gnomon throwing its thin, brushwash shadow
across the lawn? Grayscale Dayspring, doesn’t everything
aspire to radiance?

.                                   Here comes the sun.

 

About the writer:
Steve Myers has published a full-length collection, Memory’s Dog, and two chapbooks. A Pushcart Prize winner, he has published sections of his Pennsylvania poem sequence in places such as Callaloo, Juxtaprose, Kestrel, Penn Review, Permafrost, The Southern Review, Stone Canoe, Tar River Poetry, and Valley Voices. He is a director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at DeSales University. Explore more of Steve Myers work in the new PDF pamphlet Once There Was a Way from Buttonhook Press.

Image: Nude in Dappled Sunlight by Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939). Oil on canvas. 38 x 51.1 inches. 1915. Public domain.

OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprint Buttonhook Press, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation supporting writers and artists worldwide.

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