G.C. Waldrep

SAINT SAUVEUR

Mount Desert

Am I music? is what
the water asks. (It isn’t.)

I spend some time
with lichen
encased beneath a sheath
of transparent ice.

I wait
for the years
to drop away from me.
(They don’t.)

Everything listens
a little,

including the past (what
we think of as the past,
which is a ghost).

This is the non-sound
of everything
listening.

It’s what poetry aspires to.

Hush now,
children I never had.
Let water
comb the ghosts away.

You can’t
not judge me anymore.

G.C. WALDREP lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University. His most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, 2024). Recent work appears in American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, The Nation, New American Writing, New England Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Yale Review.