Page 67 - WTP VOl. V #9

— lieve,
because now I understand I was unfaithful
to the wordless oath I swore in my mother’s womb, to never not desire to be,
ry, as
and so ineligible, for all that time, for joy.
ht,
6.
Here hibiscus blooms midsummer
and I try to conceive of time
without numbers, as nothing I can ask
to identify itself in any language I might understand: how long has it taken
reath ead,
emed me.
for the ivy, trembling on this crumbling wall to have climbed this far? The wind
ef had their work to do as well, ons, our indignation,
ther and wheel,
we cannot
would tear the leaves from the vine if they were any other shape. And we
r beloved is still ely memory.
require of ourselves and one another too many things we imagine necessary.
e harbor
e bridge at snow
ding from the darkness, ths,
ster
ma
ef seasons,
Hoffman has published four volumes of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; and his new collection Noon until Night. His other books include the celebrated Half the House: a Memoir, published in a 20th Anniversary Edition in 2015, the 2014 memoir Love & Fury, and the story collection Interference and Other Stories. His work, both prose and verse, appears in such journals as Agni, Barrow Street, Consequence, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, The Manhattan Review, Poetry, Witness and elsewhere. A former Chair of PEN New England, he is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston.
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