3 poems by G.C. Waldrep

THE ABANDONED VICTORIAN GARDENS AT SADDELL

The beech trees’ embarrassment of strangeness goes before us

like a herald the dark is all too tired of entertaining. If there’s honey

then it’s poisoned honey, rhododendron-rich. The earth

doesn’t have a lot to say, chiefly mend & rend in each of their

sixty-four conjugations. It pretends the sea’s not there, waiting—

replete in its not-waiting. Which is exactly how I remember

my father, as a coldness in the estate of otherwise vacated Sundays.

It’s my private amnesty composed from a target, a key,

a clock, & a spell. I sing to it, but all it wants to know is my name.

LEPHINCORRACH (#1)

     (a)

The body separates from the body, a little: true or false.

No sign of faith’s crutch here.

What lasts in the pile of relics from which we choose.

     (b)

Propose not what you want, but what want wants.

Turn, dawn—

                       wheel of sleep I scrubbed from certainty.

A human breath it can polish & shape into a crown.

AMONG WITNESSES

The green domes of the two solitary beech trees in the pasture

where the lambs were. The notes they take

in their scripts of hydrogen, oxygen, lignin, water, & sugar.

How they may or may not perceive God

as a bargain, as a judgment, as a god, or as another beech tree.

But they take such careful notes, of this I’m sure.

I can see their thousand hands moving the invisible styluses.

The fire burns low in the grate, as if counting slowly to itself.

Later, lying in the dark, I will think how close

I came to learning something about the histories of certainty.

_____________

G.C. Waldrep is the author of eight collections of poetry and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His latest, The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, 2024), was one of the New York Times‘s five best poetry collections of 2024.