Assent
As a boy I woke
to the troubled
breathing one
morning of a
lamb on
the front lawn.
I could see
the thing lay
mangled in
a coat of dew
and the dog
was carving
into its neck.
Too early in
the world for
so much blood,
I routed the dog
into the barn,
and from the mud
I lifted the infant
thing into my
arms and bore it
across the gravel
while it burst
quietly through
into a world I’d
never known.
An Offense
I recall Rilke writing
once in one of his elegies
that ‘super-abundant
being’ was welling up
in his heart, and I read
it as if it were a sort
of promissory note,
enabling him to exist
better than he did
before he was born,
before life, as if he
had been taught
somehow to want
more than what
only one world
could offer him.
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Travis Wright is a graduate student in Charlotte, where he lives with
his wife Emily and their small daughter. He is interested in devices of ambiguity
and paradox. His work has appeared previously in the Brooklyn Quarterly and
ARTOS, among others.