J.P. White
Besides This, You Know What Time It is
—Romans 13:11
Besides this, it’s that time when I fear
the most prized corner of my monologue will never calve
and drop into a colossal sea of unknowing,
so I can begin again the impossible dialogue with the world.
It’s the time when someone I love is about to arrive
and someone else is making ready to leave.
You can see this clutch and freeze in the jawbones
Of people in queue at stores not yet open for business,
How they are puzzled by their wish
for a day that had started elsewhere.
And David, inside his vast chemo brain,
When Lynda told him he was dying, said,
Fuck. Really? So soon?
How else to say this?
Some ruminant blend of delight and dread sits with me
In my 3 a.m. kitchen like an army on the edge of an invasion
and the reluctant Yes that hovers over all things
has yet to break bread with my insistent No.
It’s the time when the innumerable orchestras are still lit
In the tall grass, when the moon
is a bent teaspoon in a whiskey lip,
and there’s nothing you can say
to yourself you haven’t told yourself before,
but despite the tear of additions and subtractions,
you wait up with the night, then you wait with the morning.
J.P. White is the author of the poetry collections The Sleeper at the Party (Defined Providence Press, 2001), The Salt Hour (The University of Illinois Press, 2001), The Pomegranate Tree Speaks from the Dictator’s Garden, (Holy Cow Press, 1988), and In Pursuit of Wings (Panache Books, 1978). His essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and anthologies. He holds a BA from New College (1973), an MA from Colorado State University (1977), and an MFA from Vermont College (1990). He lives on Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis.
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