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SYCAMORE GAP TRIPTYCH
Sycamore Gap
The growth of things, performing its sequestration dance.
Slow passage recollecting the plinth from which it tarried.
Sycamore Gap
The hereinafter as recorded by gravity, gravity’s echo-trap.
All the ablutions listen, listen to the bronze book.
The present tense, its Eden subramifying, brailing the snow.
Sycamore Gap
The fissure, oath-affirming. Transient order my name
consents to, a bonfire of mutable faces.
Come away, into the kiss of arrival. A shelter hums there.
LANERCOST POEMS
Restitution (Lanercost)
In a thirteenth-century doodle in the margin of the cartulary,
the priory church has a spire rising high above the stonework,
piercing all appeals to the law. Historians & archaeologists
insist there is no evidence
this spire ever existed. Perhaps, they say, it was aspirational.
Lanercost
The wind tips its shadow up from the yes. Not far now,
where the guns have their say.
The star threads its one,
metropolitan mouth. Open, veil of shining attestation.
Lanercost
Brother house, brother Tabor, the sea has its nights, too.
Stone’s pure deduction, as blind as it is lame.
Spindleward, from which the dawn-howl, bled, retreats.
Parabola of remembered voices, strung limb from limb.
All the necessities half-spooled,
half-souled. Learning to conjugate that verb, to grasp.
Lanercost
Meniscus of birdsong on the green slope leading
upward to where the wall commends
these cleared fields. The mouth makes a home
inside its devastations; a chord worlds the nothingness
it mis-imagines. The proof of things
scratching through the wax of decision, decision.
Lanercost
The guest, worn to a praying nub. How green the miracle
prinks,
bride-for-a-day. Sheltering on the distaff flank of silence.
G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, 2024), named one of the New York Times’s five best poetry collections of 2024. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University.
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