A UNIFIED THEORY
BY KEITH S. WILSON
2018 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
Call it aesthetics or beauty, but you privilege
a portion of her face, let’s say your eyes
are accustomed to a certain side,
the way you have a specific space to lay
your body when sleeping with her—
first in your bed
and then in any other, any horizontal plane.
Some would say this isn’t real symmetry,
but you know of course it is,
with you as the vertical, the folding line,
and through no intention on either side,
her face is curiously balanced
(yours in hers for all you know); imagine
a card tower as custom-built for the hold of the moon—your chest,
the satellite holding. A million instances in which you’ve drawn
a complicated cursive R. Every time, stop to think, starting
in the same place, say, her right eye to the curve of the bridge of her nose,
her cheekbones, and you find yourself
like a contractor building over and over the same home.
She takes her steps too, though you never think to ask
whether she begins first with the plates or the spoons,
and when you tell her, you mean it
as a working definition. Or specifically, this is why
she cannot help but be, to you. And that is only her face—
you have awakened by the mouth
of this wave, and again this wave, again,
for so long as to let the name change. What arced her
like the inside of a pitcher of water,
and makes you a cartographer you cannot know by this,
but here you are, facing
this little world with the only science
you know. So what that it’s easy to love
a country when your body has grown into its shell?
So what if you play favorites with this history?
You think, what if I am stuck like this? What if
I never change? So what.
Never change.
Moments are not for revision—
if they are lived honestly, they are open to one interpretation
only. They make you like a child.
Of course that’s what they make.
AUBADE ON BACHELORHOOD and never becoming the flash
BY KEITH S. WILSON
2018 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
they say that if i were able to run
at the speed of light,
(or god willing past it)
time would curl
on itself like fire after leaves.
imagine the spokes
of a wheel reversing as you watch,
a swallow glancing in your path,
and becoming a bullet fired forward on a chain
and thrown back
into his shell. to have access
to the place nostalgia goes to slink,
hard and slow,
like Samson in restraints. to see
clumps of sugar hang like organs
in the cathedral of the sugar jar,
the histrionic sun, and our fingers
braiding, then unbraiding.
in the divine verticals,
our bodies wed
other orbits of love. Forever
is for the mind and not the body.
there are many ways to die
they say. i find it difficult
to believe. for any of us,
there is only one.
6:45 p.m.
BY KEITH S. WILSON
2018 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
And the door opened in, as a sapphire
asserts a certainty of blue and you, through the hall
like an alarm, and my body determined some parcel
of space, your lips in passing,
and you reclined into the silence of the bed,
and must have always found yourself there while I was not
thinking. How surely you dreamed. And what was in your head
was a better thing than art, or rather, it was more beautiful
to wonder than to know; the absent-minded stretches
of you where I might, while sitting, hit a deer. What made you finally
stand? It’s astounding I never upset you
of your mystery. Loving is a misnomer, because you are expected
of your heart’s opinion on a sentence that is never completed,
even as you’re having it. Nothing must be more free than the feeling
of the right to leave. You were really something
like a cutting the way you laid yourself in water
every night reading. But the days average on and the planets
circle round us like sharks. God it’s pretty.
But what does any of it mean? We pronounced ourselves
over and over and afterwards we lay almost translucent, unmoved,
except your movement, all the things about us a theory,
unburdened by the soft uncertain finish of the night.
