Two
poems from William Winfield Wright's Poems About Naked
followed
by a note on the author
Learning
Not to Drown
Start
small with glasses of water,
longer showers and deep breathing.
Take
walks in the rain and stand
in the neighbors’ sprinklers.
Frequent
jetties, piers, ferries and when
in England places they call the strand.
If
you inherit a boat or fall in love
with a mermaid, be sure to read up
thoroughly
on each. Hug the shore.
Swim only near shoals and in the shallows.
On
the water at night wear a life vest
and distribute your weight evenly
as
you look over the gunwale
into her eyes and then the reflected stars.
The
throat can clot with speech or water,
and we can sink almost anywhere, so don’t
struggle
at
those moments when you feel your life
spread out before you, when you begin
to
let go into the perfect and buoyant dark,
when your chest and mouth fill with
salt and wet.
Learn
to accept the gesture
of breath from someone else’s mouth.
Learn
to turn your head to the side and dribble
when they pump your arms, to cough
and
gasp when they strike your back.
Believe the stories of the tides in Cyrano,
how
your long hair damp from the waves
will lift you toward the moon’s certain
face.
In
Praise of Wrinkles
Chaos theory would have us believe that
the gathered sheets on even this small
bed are infinitely long.
If
this is true, then the forgotten shirt
and the rolled blazer go on and on forever.
The
palms of our hands and feet can never have enough said about them.
The same
holds for the creases that work our elbows and wrists.
My
fingertips catch on your face, about your eyes and forehead,
in the corners
of your open mouth, and along the whorls of your ears.
The
folds of our intestines and brains can stretch for miles,
in the one a forest
of hairs
and
in the other, carefully unwadded and smoothed out,
small little pieces of colored
paper.
©
William
Winfield Wright was born in Fresno, California in 1960 and earned a BA from Linfield
College, MA from the University of New Hampshire and PhD from the University of
Arizona. A Fulbright Scholar and Professor of English at Mesa State College, he
lives in Grand Junction, Colorado with his son Cosmo. He has edited a bilingual
issue of the journal Pinyon, and his work has appeared in the Beloit
Poetry Journal, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Field, the
Ninth Letter, the Seattle Review, the South Carolina Review,
Third Coast, and elsewhere.
"In
Praise of Wrinkles" first appeared in Diagram.
