July 18, 2018

Jeff Whitney

DEAR PHIL,

Spring and I’m on my perch doing my courtship dance
to the stars asking for poems and accolades and a thousand
pages with my name written over and over. It’s simple
to want one thing so much you strap a bomb to your chest
and shake hands with strangers. Don’t blame god for this mess
but don’t take him out of the equation entirely. I’m walking around
like a pink bird trying to find the hidden caterpillar, attempting to speak
phantom, doing my best impression of a man all but crowned.
What’s it like in your kingdom? Disposal still broken, the town drunk
still calling you queer? How much have you lost on a single bet
you wouldn’t gladly turn to pennies and flatten like dominoes
on a track back to Missouri? When you say “a milk in this world
sweet enough to last” I get so jealous I want to put you in a hot air
balloon and send you to Mars and write my name on your poems.
Of course, history is full of people like that. Grifters and short-
shrifts. Sometimes it happens to a country entire and nothing is left
but the wind that used to work itself like a boa over shoulders
and the fires where they were go down to nothing like the ghost
of a ghost. But don’t go feeling sorry. Don’t go setting nets
under every acrobat. Just put a knife in your teeth and grab a rope
and do your best to find a ledge. You wouldn’t believe the luck
we had one summer in Idaho coming around a bend to find a bear.
All she did was look, bored as a drug dealer, at us, then lick herself
and go. It was like a story almost. Something you’d write then x
out, choosing instead for the great tiger in the sky to run us down
like children to a mantis. Then, feeling too sad to fuck, we tell our wives
we are too sad to fuck. Something as plain as bewilderment
in a city where it never snows and all of a sudden out of nowhere it does.

from Rattle #59, Spring 2018

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Jeff Whitney: “One of my favorite collections of poems is Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. I love epistolary poems, and so, in an attempt to enter into the waters of the letter poem, I began writing back and forth with my long-time poetry collaborator and pal, Philip Schaefer.” (web)

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October 31, 2017

Jeff Whitney

THE BLESSING

Las Vegas Shooter’s Room in Mandalay Bay Hotel Blessed by Catholic Priest
—Newsweek headline, 10/25/17

Even the ants in the walls
are Catholic, on all knees
& hauling in their mouths
the dead home, rising
between floors toward
heaven. If there is wind
it is from the window-
less part of the room
where a hole ten butterflies wide
whistles the whole night
more silent. And a man
speaking for the living.
Isn’t this all we can do? Wait
for diamonds. Clutch someone’s
heart. In the desert a star
means luck. Some nights
after a bad beat or run
of jacks you might hear them
falling and believe you are hearing
the first word echoed back,
the blessing that says
tonight in this shining city
even the stars will drop.
Buckets of the rarest coin.

from Poets Respond
October 31, 2017

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Jeff Whitney: “This poem responds to a Newsweek headline that was published this week: ‘Las Vegas Shooter’s Room in Mandalay Bay Hotel Blessed by Catholic Priest.’ It was so difficult not to imagine the really quite unusual scene that must have taken place.” (web)

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