On Fasting

 

      mud’s tapered thrust            of gasoline:  of
      piston:        is taken from:         a painting         inside

      the cave the chest makes, only         older than that:

      applewood:  to ashes:         slakes a spectrum
                  through which
      penance myrtles, always          the hermeticist:

      we sew suits           for this, block the river
      from its limestone     resurrection:         Tell me a story:

      we were far away,           all of us, & pressed
      to powder,          as if by thumbs, the way an oven

      door, opened, seems to put a face          to suffering:
                   come the scientists:
      there is something to be said        for motion,

      geography’s          Sunday supplement:
                    burnt to embassy:
      stem from wire unspiraling, the mourners

      rising        ecstatic, upward        from their benches:
                      bone messenger:
      we model how they           lived, their cookfires

      & crude         implements, I mean
      they loved their children, we         conclude, &
                    God is a machine through which

      the soul          keeps driving:         (linen rheostat):
      (brumal radiance):          Geiger of tongue,         sweat’s
                    candle pearls         in sequence:

 
 

G. C. WALDREP‘s most recent collection, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2011), was a collaborative project with the poet John Gallaher. More recent, solo work appears in New American Writing, Boulevard, Threepenny Review, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.