The difference
between the yew
& the boxwood
is that boxwood
doesn’t know
it etherizes
its own children
(Plath).
The yew does.
Nights are
shorter, shedding
their liquified
husks. Asylum
experiments
crowd marquees
that speak
in noble gases.
The yew in this
light, vs.
the boxwood.
One reflects, one
absorbs.
What is truth,
Pilate asked.
To walk at dusk
& not,
for a time,
to hear voices.
G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021) and feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University.
