Unconditional Endorsement of the Future
|
So long I was told
be patient, the world will come, and like a frog inching up a pant leg I leaned into the great eye of a telescope. Summer. Five wars in six days. Three bodies in three states. Now we make terrible lovers because we can’t stop counting the snakes in the yard, one with orange stripes like a tiger, one wrapped in the claws of an eagle on the belt buckle of a man with his skull in his hands. It’s like this when you don’t live forever: the dead in boats and the dead in heaven, the dead stuffed into shotgun shells and shot wildly into air, the dead fall around us, we blink them from our eyes. At most singing is what we do. And then the trumpets. And then the screaming. |
|
Jeff Whitney is the author of The Tree With Lights, available from Thrush Press, while Radio Silence (Black Lawrence Press) and Smoke Tones (Phantom Books) were co-written with Philip Schaefer. Other poems can be found in Adroit, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and Verse Daily. He lives in Portland, where he teaches English.