Greg Hewett, “echo 97”

Author: Poetry Editor

May 19, 2011

In this Thursday’s Poetry Spotlight, a poem from Greg Hewett’s darkacre (Coffee House Press), one of this year’s Lambda Literary Award finalists for Gay Male Poetry.

echo 97

in a crowd one of them looks down
at his own crotch     adjusts
his equipment as if
to make sure it is still
there or maybe just to stop
that zero sensation
of being in a place
unremembered here
where the post road once ran
by a brook that once ran
as it passed into marsh that once was
and the elm the elm almost
a memory     and nearby
wolf tracks their faint trace
petrified many strata below
++++++++++++ and then a memory
++++++++++++ of moonlight
like this     or maybe just a feeling
of collective desolation
that’s all     as he shifts
his vitals again
_________________________
Lost in the space between them like he’s always been, only worse, like Washington Square is the abyss.

——

GREG HEWETT is the author of The Eros Conspiracy, Red Suburb, To Collect the Flesh, and most recently, darkacre. His poetry collections have received a Publishing Triangle Award, two Minnesota Book Award nominations, and an Indie Bound Poetry Top Ten recommendation. The recipient of Fulbright fellowships to Denmark and Norway, he has been a fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Provence, and is currently Associate Professor of English at Carleton College in Minnesota.