Once in the West by Christian Wiman

Author:Christian Wiman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713546
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Even eighty he was upright, vainlean,

flush with thatch like a lucky chickadee;

a kind of sniff-the-fingers juvenescence to him,

something cerulean, otherwhere, a purity

of emptiness you had to admire,

like Phoenix, for instance, Palm Springs,

or some other sunland where mortals go to die.

Not him. How can death touch what life has not,

what night nullify the six-sharp whiskey

ambering in him, the cloud-skirted virgins,

the sundown sandstone tigering up the sky?

RAZING A TOWER

Once in the west I rose to witness

the cleverest devastation.

It was early but I was late

and the quiet into which I crept—

nightshifters, gin-veined men,

a stare with a burn scar and a rosary—

was intimate, inviolate, tribal.

I didn’t so much keep it as was kept.

A whisper-rupture, feathery detonation,

last concussive flush of a great heart giving way

and all the outworn stories collapsed

in a kind of apocalyptic plié.

Vanish the dancer and the dance remains

a time, an agile absence on the air.

I cannot say what, or why, or even when it was.

I only know it happened, and I was there.

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