Issue 66, Fall 2021
A Charm
By W.F. Lantry
When you enchanted me, your flowing dress
was everything I knew of heaven. When
you moved through snow and rounded drifts, I knew
a warmth I hadn’t understood before,
not even in the summer, when vines grew
a foot each day, their tendrils twisting, then
turning toward the sun, as if to catch
my hands, entangle both my arms, attach
my spirit, clockwise, to their trellis frame
in August. But the winter frees us all,
and even winds in swirling may restore
a crystalline charisma, and recall,
as if in warmth, the meaning of a name
you whispered almost silently, or cast
as naked invocation, unsurpassed
by any chant or song I might invent
while dreaming of your silk or cashmere, drawn
in memory. I wanted to explore
just then, those ripples, curving, touching on
the images I hoped to represent
in words beyond the phrases I possess.
W.F. Lantry spent many years gardening in his native San Diego and in the South of France. Currently he lives in the frozen North of DC. His full-length collections are: The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree), winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award, and The Terraced Mountain (Little Red Tree). Honors include National Hackney Literary Award, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors’ Prize, Old Red Kimono Paris Lake Poetry Prizeand Potomac Review Prize. He edits Peacock Journal.