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    The Weight of Light
    The Weight of Light
    The Weight of Light
    Ebook130 pages47 minutes

    The Weight of Light

    By Gary Lemons

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    About this ebook

    Gary Lemons’s The Weight of Light breaks down the wall between poet and reader and invites us to meditate with him on all things beautiful and ugly, in a way that makes us proud to be a part of the world. Lemons explores human and nonhuman relationships, dissecting them just enough to give us a glimpse before sealing them back up and tucking them into the pages. He shows us the painful, the heartbreaking, the fearful—but pairs them with the magnificent and the joyful in such a way that we are relieved and elated to have them all. “The hunger in everything wants out,” he tells us, and this collection contains the hunger to truly know the world. “It’s here—and so am I—and so are you” and we are delighted and humbled to be here with him.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRed Hen Press
    Release dateMay 2, 2017
    ISBN9781597095730
    The Weight of Light
    Author

    Gary Lemons

    Gary Lemons studied for two years with Donald Justice, Norman Dubie, and Marvin Bell in the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at Iowa City from 1971–1973. He has published five books of poetry, including Bristol Bay, Día de los Muertos, Snake, Snake: Second Wind (the last two of which comprise the first two books of the Snake Quartet), and The Weight of Light. For decades he fished Alaska, built grain elevators, worked high steel and re-forested the clear cuts of the Pacific Northwest. Currently he and his wife, the artist Nöle Giulini, teach yoga from their studio, Tenderpaws, in Port Townsend, Washington.

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      Book preview

      The Weight of Light - Gary Lemons

      Winter Tides

      1

      The last thing I remember—

      Before they placed the ether rag

      Over my face in preparation for cutting

      Off the leg now iridescent as an oil spill

      At sunrise—is the surgeon’s yellow teeth

      Clenching the stem of a dead cigarette—

      I was pulled through the years

      Across a pure white snow by my brothers

      And sisters between bare hardwood

      Trees cut down by partisans

      To build an abatis around the last

      Outpost of impossible innocence—

      In this safe place we agreed—to

      Never grow old—protected by gasmasks

      From the toxic fumes of legacy dreams—

      We stood without weapons like a forest the years

      Approach with hatchets and saws to

      Turn wilderness into useful things.

      We melted the red snow—

      Drank the remnant protein in vows pried

      From the tongues of our fallen.

      The death of the illusion—bah—

      What is that to us who never believed

      In the ridiculous theatre of clocks.

      2

      I awaken in the dirt beside

      A young woman with no face below

      The nose—she has the most

      Beautiful green eyes—as if the forest

      Grew out of them into me—as

      If there was light—and she rising

      Up the stem of her spine

      From torn earth into the bloom

      Coveted by the harvesters.

      Outside the bunker a child

      Wrestles with a dog for my lost leg—

      One—of course—to sup on it—the

      Other for the boot and the lace—

      This resembles the tomorrow

      We thought to prevent—

      Littered with blown luggage

      And broken vials and wet needles

      Of pine fallen on torn flags

      In a darkness lit up by fear.

      3

      A siren with a lute is singing

      Across time to all of us—words

      She makes up on the spot—her

      Unrehearsed lyrics as beautiful

      As the light trapped in the folds

      Of her tail—like winter inside a

      Sun-drenched rose—

      She recites the song of icicles

      Melting—the sound of bones

      Mending—the words we remember

      Long after we come down from mountains

      To see we are mountains—

      The song has many elements—

      Mixing restraint and anger into forgiveness—

      And leaf mold in ditches—the patrician

      Approval of fathers—the historical

      Letters signed when love was

      As simple as a vineyard by the sea.

      4

      The train slows for the whistle

      Stop known as death—the broken

      Petals of wildflowers still blue

      In a frozen meadow under snow

      Have little to say about the speed

      Of light—only the weight of it.

      In the gardens of memory a hemophilic

      Ghost juggles two-edged swords

      Where even the slightest cut causes

      Long-forgotten details like sunlight

      On a collarbone to bleed out

      Into an unexpected fire that vaporizes

      The character known as the self—

      What’s left after the resistance fails?

      The cause now altered by the sacrifice

      Of those who died for it—and this is all

      The fossils of innocence in the heart will reveal—

      The shadows that don’t fade at night—

      Dragging each other toward hidden light

      As the sun goes down.

      A Wealth of Little

      This is cold—a blue tremble—

      The blizzard is over but inside

      The snow still falls—

      Image 1—my people

      Coughing kerosene—walls like eyes

      Remembering the panic of livestock

      Trapped by fox as the protection of the last

      Dog drips over a yellow flame—

      This is a vestige of joy—the quiet

      Power of mountains

      In the eyes of a something consumed

      By and for its sacrifice—

      Image 2—bodies fragrant

      As birth rags—mountains so sharp the sky

      Spreads a destitute form of worship

      Over an unforgiving

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