Christian Anton Gerard
Christian Anton Gerard In The Introspective
This time I’m ready to wear the skeleton suit
and smell like a birthday candle. I walk now
a skeleton re-wrought because of one woman,
It is like Peire Vidal wearing the fur of the wolf,
and the shepherd’s dogs / have run [him] to earth.
You know the rest, how he was left for dead, how
for one woman, the wolf fur, the seeing what is not
there, the breathing its day, the asking where were you.
Forever I found that saddest line. But no. Throw a brick
through the other guy’s window (then pay for it).
Cicadas unearth themselves after three hundred years.
Someone’s boot will lay undisturbed on the ocean floor
after this reckoning is reckoned. There’s a picture
of a boot like that in a book called Titanic.
That picture’s stayed with me since second grade.
What remains. What remains after reckoning.
I’m saying maybe Vidal saw her everywhere,
maybe he means she’d been there the whole time
I’m asked at first the same question each day about H,
but I was a wolf pup playing at passion.
Vidal though, my brother, you wore your own skin.
Your own heart, that tender thing. It had to be.
I know because I stand before her. Peire, in my heart,
I see my mouth in spring float away on the river,
which gives me leave to tell her I am hers
and I am in my own skin. A wolf’s
not vicious. A wolf loves the right way,
killing what it must to feed what life wills.
Christian Anton Gerard is the author of Holdfast (forthcoming from C&R Press in early 2018) and Wilmot Here, Collect For Stella (WordTech, CW Books imprint, 2014). He’s received Pushcart Prize nominations, scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Some of his recent poems appear (or will) in The Adroit Journal, The Pinch, Post Road and elsewhere. Gerard is an Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Find Christian on the web at www.christianantongerard.com
Return to January 2017 Edition
This time I’m ready to wear the skeleton suit
and smell like a birthday candle. I walk now
a skeleton re-wrought because of one woman,
It is like Peire Vidal wearing the fur of the wolf,
and the shepherd’s dogs / have run [him] to earth.
You know the rest, how he was left for dead, how
for one woman, the wolf fur, the seeing what is not
there, the breathing its day, the asking where were you.
Forever I found that saddest line. But no. Throw a brick
through the other guy’s window (then pay for it).
Cicadas unearth themselves after three hundred years.
Someone’s boot will lay undisturbed on the ocean floor
after this reckoning is reckoned. There’s a picture
of a boot like that in a book called Titanic.
That picture’s stayed with me since second grade.
What remains. What remains after reckoning.
I’m saying maybe Vidal saw her everywhere,
maybe he means she’d been there the whole time
I’m asked at first the same question each day about H,
but I was a wolf pup playing at passion.
Vidal though, my brother, you wore your own skin.
Your own heart, that tender thing. It had to be.
I know because I stand before her. Peire, in my heart,
I see my mouth in spring float away on the river,
which gives me leave to tell her I am hers
and I am in my own skin. A wolf’s
not vicious. A wolf loves the right way,
killing what it must to feed what life wills.
Christian Anton Gerard is the author of Holdfast (forthcoming from C&R Press in early 2018) and Wilmot Here, Collect For Stella (WordTech, CW Books imprint, 2014). He’s received Pushcart Prize nominations, scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Some of his recent poems appear (or will) in The Adroit Journal, The Pinch, Post Road and elsewhere. Gerard is an Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Find Christian on the web at www.christianantongerard.com
Return to January 2017 Edition