POEM OF THE WEEK: WILLIAM BREWER

William Brewer

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Halfway House Diary

 

Somewhere at the bottom of the world a whale is singing to itself,

running through its temple of otherlight and salt.

 

I have decided water has a god and its name is gravity.

When it’s my turn to fix the gutters, I call myself

Master of the Aqueducts.

 

When on some mornings, as with this one,

I wake to my roommate bent over my bed,

wrapped in his sheets, whispering,

“you’re only half here,”

I pretend it doesn’t wreck me,

that I don’t wonder all day where the other half went.

 

In the sun’s mouth, where for years I pissed heaven?

In the arithmetic of the things I was never able to say?

 

What’s the point?

What’s lost isn’t dead until it’s found.

 

The river ice is breaking up,

smokewhite glass washing over the voiceless stones,

and I can’t help but take it personally.

 

Some nights, a whale song.

Some nights, I’m halfway here and it’s almost too much.

 

 

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William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series, and Oxyana, selected for the Poetry Society of America’s 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative (where it was awarded the 30 Below Prize), The Nation, A Public Space, and other journals. Currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he was born and raised in West Virginia.