Roger Reeves
Not the debridement of the wound—the wedding
Dress decanted of the bones and snow-blown skin
Of a bride circling through the splinters of winter,
The ash and orchard of a gray heaven surrounding
The tumble of guests leaking out into the night
To wish her sloughing off of dress and wound well—
No, not this debridement, which is greeted with cake
And cymbal and the calling on of a mastering god,
Which is perhaps the dusk erasing itself from day,
The healthy skin of night pulled taut over the bone-
Clots of stars, the chronic fever of noon driven off
Like the fox to the farthest blue hills, the fever kept
There, hidden, hot and vigilant, in the fox’s mouth
Which is perhaps the debridement I have been
Looking for—something that will linger inside a suicide
And eat around the bullet still thrumming against
The salt and clatter of the brain which is now below
The bob and tether of an ocean that opens itself
Like a wound, maggot, your mouth, how lightly you travel
Through the ribs of beggars and barns, kings and convents,
How often they’ve misnamed your benevolence,
Teach me again that I do not own this body
That walks me over this snow and cracked pavement,
The winter light pulling at my bare ankles, teach me
What to do with the dead I carry in my mouth,
Teach me to travel light with their bodies in my belly.
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Roger Reeves's poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. Kim Addonizio selected “Kletic of Walt Whitman” for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology. He was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and two Cave Canem Fellowships. Recently, he earned his PhD at the University of Texas and is currently an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His first book, King Me, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in October 2013. |