Blossom and Portraits
New Poetry from The Metropolitan Review
We at The Metropolitan Review are incredibly thrilled to announce the launch of our new poetry section today. Our Poetry Editor, , will be overseeing the editing and curation of the section, which will feature ambitious, innovative, and eclectic poems to both liven up your day and reinvigorate our culture. Today’s poems are from the poet Grayson Wolf. These poems use language to capture the intensity of change, life, and death. They highlight the quotidian quality of how observation can shape us.
Note: The start of “Blossom” refers to Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Everything Changes.”
—The Editors
Blossom
You can change with your last breath and you can change with your last breath writes Bertolt Brecht and in the book of change you turn the page and turn the page until there you are a bus a train a short walk into your life but what you feel is that you might be dying as whatever it is that desires in you that hopes that moves has slid the brightness up on your morning window a cloud down on your mind. With a whistle only you can hear an invisible leash and collar fit for your neck a label for your name you are its dog now up too early now somehow on a run. A run?—you who hates to run asks—me? Feet beneath you resembling yours and ouch that stings the dribbling sweat in the eyes it is everywhere you can barely see as the sun paints the sidewalk’s bright flicker-book with your slap -stick figure and gait. You the bobble-head the dark disc the traversing rock of the Pulaski’s endless arc. Up and back. Up and back. Brain me brain you ask your brain. Fall on me building you beg one passing building tall and made of glass. But pausing at the top after a few laps to catch your breath you gaze over the railing at the light wrinkling the water below and what you see has nothing to do with you. A beauty strange as the previous feeling is irretrievable. A bit of litter drifting downriver. Snatch of white against a tilt blue-green. It’s a good few minutes between the relief you feel from the rack you felt and a new note of anxious anticipation. You are a turnstile after all. And what’s answered your prayers was perhaps only half-listening: having doused the flame you were but left like a cigarette in a sleeping hand this ember burning. As when Zeus slides his god-eyes from Hector’s beveled nipples to admire the mare -milkers of those distant horse-groomed hills and many of the wrong army die —even the gods who turn attentively from something else turn away. Which is to say the gods are terrible at what only they can do. These errors we call ways the ways we attribute to error and other gods a wheel from dim to bright orange pain. But the olive trees blossomed. Therefore the olive trees blossomed. Nevertheless the olive trees blossomed. Delicate clusters of cream-white flowers. And so you make like a blossom and turn the page.
Portraits
1 As if bygone and therefore all-the-more. As in pluperfect, as in had. As if swivel-headed and slipping between the colored flags of traffic—purloined yet intermittent—as a figure is inside a kineograph, cleaved to a few skipping particulars. 2 As between the body and the mind beneath it is a kind of gossip: as much saying as gainsaid, as if unsaid: an erasure or Sous rature ( ) a beveled surface. 3 No cameras, she raises her hand as if her hand withheld the image, she looks... As if to say I am not her face her eyes do not. The image a carefully tied knot of not, not, not. 4 An inflection of look: a rupture; the bent reflection, split as on storefronts, car windows, stilled then silt-washed—one moment into the next a pre-chorus: Of, of, of. 5 As a person is what can’t be in one vision, of course, you are —or were—in pieces, even the edges have edges. You turn I turn—as at a waltz—I orbit you orbit me.
Grayson Wolf is a graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Four Way Review, Diagram, Prelude, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.
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This is really cool. Glad to hear it!