AUP New Poets 4 by Chris Tse

Author:Chris Tse [Jones, Harry: Scudder, Erin: Tse, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2012-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Fall

I walked into my present

a second too late.

Your arrow missed and hit my brain.

And here I am quite useless, now,

all swollen head and inauspicious heart.

What if I had known?

I could have coursed down

an alternate path: down one of those veins

that skirts my errors

and siphons my secrets.

I say to myself that I would have flown,

that wings were what I wanted

to get to you ahead of time.

This surprise love is vertical,

it has not run along beside me like a river:

the heights to which it threw itself appear only in descent,

like a geyser;

its heights are not made of concrete,

but of water,

without footholds.

I would have needed to catch you before you fell, or before the lift

cable snapped, or whatever. Now how can I know what you

were doing up there, just before,

in the height when it was a height unto itself, not unto a fall.

Was I just then on my way up to meet you – couldn’t these things come to

love as well as death?

I can only write about

what I wish you would have.

I can only say that I don’t know

why we write poems after things have happened instead of when

they are useful,

before, not after, the précis.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.