G. C. Waldrep

G. C. Waldrep was born in 1968 in South Boston, Virginia. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate, took his MA and PhD in American History from Duke University, and, in 2005, received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Between 1995 and 2000, he was a member of the New Order Amish community in Yanceyville, North Carolina, where he worked as a carpenter’s helper, baker, and window-maker. Waldrep’s poems have appeared in such journals as American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, New American Writing, and Ploughshares. His first book of poems is Goldbeater’s Skin (Center for Literary Publishing, 2003). Waldrep is also the author of the nonfiction book Southern Workers and the Search for Community (University of Illinois Press, 2000). His work has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the North Carolina Arts Council. For the 2005-06 academic year, Waldrep is serving as a Visiting Professor of History and Poetry at Deep Springs College in Inyo County, California.

The Miracles of St. Sebastian

Stooping in the dooryard the boy saint picks up the body. He is curious, he begins to massage the tissue around the eyelids; begins to pluck, feather by feather, then the skin—a deeper massage—pulling away from the cranium. It is not his firm pressure that accomplishes anything, he is merely part of a larger process that would take longer were it not for his assistance.

He does not think sparrow.

He thinks, vaguely, bird. He thinks, more specifically, skull: it’s the bone he wants, near shimmer, its pallid shoal.

His own hand is a skeleton reaching after a skeleton. This is the first lesson of desire: like to like. The fruit comes later.

Time passes. He thinks it is wrong to laugh at clowns because his grandmother tells him they were born that way, delivered from the hospital with bulbous noses and orange hair. Later he paints clowns, faces copied from financial magazines, glossy inserts, TV Guide. He dresses them up in his mind, applies the pancake and mascara, the outrageous prosthetics. He tells himself he chooses these faces because they are strong faces. They are all male.

He paints women too, many women, first as nudes, then flensed, then as skeletons. He paints hominids, he paints apes. He paints hominids painting. He paints painting apes. He paints a male chimpanzee bent over his easel and palette, sketching a female nude.

He does not think of painting a female chimpanzee sketching a male nude.

He paints a woman from the neck up. He paints a woman from the neck down. He paints three women as they pass a peach from hand to hand. He etches a woman cast upright in snow: sex, navel, eyes, breasts.

He becomes a teacher. He argues that all art is figurative; that the figure ceases to matter only when we cease to be human. He is very sure of this. He thinks all art occurs in its own time. He memorizes: fossae and tibia, coccyx and acetabulum, calcaneus and teres.

He paints his wife slipping out of the musculature of her upper back as from an evening gown. He paints himself holding his own skin.

He paints a python, curled around a branch, straining to draw a hunter’s shaft from its body with its own bloodied mouth.

What Begins Bitterly Becomes Another Love Poem

The earth has a taste for us, in its unknowing

appetite there yet resides a hunger, incompletion

that draws all life to its dark self. What, then,

shall we say of the flesh’s own desire, distal

thumb-brush at evening? There is nothing to say,

the vowels cluster uncertain in the beautiful vase

the throat makes, fricatives corralled behind

ridge of gum and bone-splinter. Flesh and earth:

fire is an illusion, to which water is the antidote.

The day was a bright one, there seemed no need

to move about with mirrors, the usual circumspection

and indirect approach. The abundance of small life

argued some measure of clemency, likewise

the Jerseys lowing in the paddock breeze, tender

shoots of cress and sweetpea spiralling upward.

But fire is a cruel hoax: now you see it,

now you don’t, the object of your affection

cast in carbon on the hard ground which will,

in time, receive. Roadside the irises bloomed

two or three feet max above soil’s surface,

rough tongue resting lightly on each leaf, each

violet exclamation. In full sun your hand guided mine

to the wound. A small one. Water and blood,

like the nurse said: prestidigitation of the body.

We stood without shadows on asphalt at midday.

What we call patience is only fire again, compressed.

I remember: your face flushed, stray petal lodged

in the damp whorl of your disheveled hair.

Hotel d’Avignon

The religious cry in their patois of sand and dusk.

If I could find the portico I would repaint the columns.

No one has left the key with me

so I sketch one on scratch paper.

I am a handy artist, so this is easy:

the notches are precise, there is a sense

of perspective in the hatching of the brass,

as from a light source.

Through the corridors I walk

with my paper key held before me.

Night is always the same here. Outside

the religious fragment slowly into the tall grasses.

My paper key is a fine instrument

and yet they are afraid of it.

All night, from their crusts of earth,

the religious mutter curses: They hope I will lose the key,

that I will crumple or erase it, at least

that I will never use it.

Listen, I call to them through the grille,

Everything in the world is a knife,

everything in the world cuts a little from you.

But they do not listen. I do not speak their language.

Through the night as through the day

I walk, perform small tasks.

Some days I think about drawing a new key.

Some days I do.

Light is untidy, my mother used to say, clucking gently.

You must collect the rays scattered about you.

O Canada!

There were these enormous Canadas, shaved & bedridden, all along the border: some on this side, some on that, some we weren’t sure about or which straddled, some we had to cross to get to, some that were the means of our crossing, some that were simply in the way, small Canadas, dumpy Canadas in which the locals once carved cells for meditation, or beekeeping, none of the authorities of our (limited) acquaintance were quite sure which, these (cavities) which we dubbed “the empty Canadas,” quixotic, inquisitive, quisling (some whispered), a bevy of Canadas, a cantonment of Canadas, such splendid Canadas!

& we were stopped on our return & our bags searched, every pocket turned out to seam, to hem, to orifice & centrifuge, had we stolen, had we cozened, had we lusted for, or against these, the smallest of Canadas, had we in fact imagined more diverse, even more exotic Canadas, had we, in touching the many Canadas of our (collective) acquaintance, so much as scraped from their sleeping hides the slenderest crescent of Canada, beneath a nail, say, and breathing hard in the dry cold of that enormous room could we swear, & avow, & affirm, that we in the future would leave those Canadas alone, that we would not so much as think of writing to those Canadas, much less cohabiting with them or engaging in minor (though illicit, & therefore profitable) trade, that we might not pirate the microecologies of those Canadas, nor duplicate for any purpose beyond the instructional, i.e. neither love, nor money, nor for the thrill of the thing itself, le frisson, le frottage,

& soon it was night & we were on our way again, and you were limping, a little, from a pebble that had lodged in your boot, & Megan was saying something about the excellent tea we’d had at the roadhouse a few villages back, & Stuart had bought a new blank journal from the Fassbinder boutique, & he was trying to write in it, while we walked, which we all, even Stuart, agreed was not particularly efficacious, but he wanted to get as much down, he said, as he could, while these memories were still fresh, which we agreed was an excellent idea, if poorly timed, & though we kept watch among ourselves, even at night (for this was the summer of the comet), we saw no more Canadas, heard no more Canadas, smelled no more Canadas (that plush & glacial nidor), ran our hands over, or across, or beneath no further Canadas, tasted no additional Canadas (but had we tasted?), until we began to wonder

had we ever been there, to Canada, or had we merely imagined the voyage, & what would it be like to go back, or rather, in the face of this growing uncertainty, to go, as if for the first time, what might we find there, and this was all we talked about as mile passed into mile, among the elk and the water buffalo, and the walk was pleasant, and the scenery was agreeable, and there was a certain balm or bite to the air which we could not name, but which made us hopeful, the azure Canadas, the wounded Canadas, the missing Canadas, the emphatic Canadas, the marsupial Canadas, the recrudescent Canadas, the vigilant Canadas, the piñata Canadas with their sugared eggs,

—every bright & yearning Canada to come—