ISSUE 32
June 2006

Christian Wiman

 

Christian Wiman Christian Wiman's most recent book of poetry is Hard Night. A selection of his essays, Ambition and Survival: Essays on Art and Life, is forthcomng next year. He is the editor of Poetry.
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Flat light and the white aisles of cotton,
sky like an idea of blue.
There's no space like this,
wide, fraught with God.

The past is not a place
but story upon story gone so far
inside of things it takes a touch
of almost inhuman love to tell them.

To be the wire through which that current burns,
conducting the stone's slow accretion
like a cry, deciphering sunlight,
to pluck sound from the rings of a tree . . .

More than this I want the silence that ensues,
to believe in nothing else but the fact of absence,
striking out again in a hard horizonless country
whose one road releases me like heat as I walk on.  

 

 

Christian Wiman: Poetry
Copyright ©2006 The Cortland Review Issue 32The Cortland Review