A SMALL LETTER FROM DES MOINES
after C D Wright
There is still in me a little hope, a little longing
for the wild nights of the past,
for that long street in Jos where people gather
at night to listen to music, drinking their beer,
while hoping someone would follow them home,
and though it is winter again,
and the sky is now in its own solitude,
I still dream of the man who sailed daily on the river
with his dog, and of the fresh garden I ran past
during the dying days of October — all those
jacks-in-the-pulpit, all those pink witches,
all those wild roses that have either been cut down
or left to die, alone by the roadside.
What does it mean to be without love?
O beloved, I, too, have come to believe
that there must be beauty even in long evenings
where every shadow resembles a figure from home,
and though I cannot describe to you
the slowness of today, I can tell you of the longing
of my heart — It was August and Sheri hills
was still wet, but we had climbed it to watch the sunset.
It has been a decade, and every city I have lived in,
I have walked through, hoping a shoulder or a scarf
would be yours. Outside there is a snowstorm coming,
and yet I crave a little joy, a little risk, some evidence
that, alone in this city, my life is not over.
THE BLUE WATER JAR AT CUMMER
For now, the blue jar sits on a windowsill
like a man without a home, staring
into the solitary wall
that divides the museum from the sea.
The fly wall across the hall
lies heavy with the debt of small bodies,
and to the left, painted on the canvas
underneath an ancient lamp gotten from Crete,
a crowd of men are surrendering their homes
to Scipio the Elder as a man, black and white haired,
weeps before a textile gotten from a village
along the coast of Guinea.
Everywhere, there is the movement of time
through the landscape of intelligence,
and in the courtyard, a Roman garden
and its cobbled streets are waiting in summer
for an eloping couple. Perhaps
when they get married, they will take a sip
out of the blue jar, for it is the fate
of lonely beings to witness beauty.
And after drinking, they will watch
the sea breakers, the returning schooner,
the porpoising of dolphins, and a dog that,
having run through its own world, watches
as the sea rise to swallow the fading sun.
THE SACRED ART OF LONGING
Coming back from a long walk, the trees that have lost
their leaves to the season of cold roofs stood at attention
like soldiers waiting for orders at the onset of battle,
and a couple, old in the ways of teeth, danced alone
in the square, moving through a song I could not hear.
Everything around me was duende, or maybe
I was filled with the wildfire of life, and from afar,
the angels carved into the blue windows of the inn
looked negligible as if they were copper pennies
left on the cracks of a cobbled street.
I stood outside, watching the innkeeper whose hands
were filled with beets and carrots, who once told me
the blue windows were carved by a maestro from Marrakech
in those days when men roamed the earth in search of wonder.
I do not know the truth of this, but I have rubbed my hands
over their surfaces, over the raised ridges of angels, and there
I found a carved lonely man walking into an overgrown forest,
and above him a fallen angel with broken wings watched
over his footsteps.
The afternoon was silent, the pigeons that hopped
on the terrace had gone holidaying under the trees,
and in the quiet praise of a distant evening
I came into believe that no angel was cast out of heaven,
instead they fell in love with men living in a walled city,
and tired of the longing that spanned across oceans
and clouds, gave up their wings and came crashing
amid the torrential rainfall of feathers.
O beloved, look behind the wardrobe in the vestibule
that leads to the entrance of our lives, I have hidden
what was left of my wings, so we could walk around
this city that in your exile you have begun to call home.
ROMEO ORIOGUN is the author of Sacrament of Bodies, a finalist for the Lambda Award; Nomad, winner of the 2022 Nigerian Prize for Literature; and The Gathering of Bastards, a finalist for the 2024 National Books Critics Circle Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Narrative Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, and POETRY. He is currently an assistant professor in the creative writing department at Florida Atlantic University.
Want to read more great poetry and prose from Issue 71? Great River Review now offers individual issues for sale. You can purchase a copy of GRR 71, or a number of other back issues, here.