By Lawrence Wray
Which poets were called for by losing a voice? When they had I knew instantly my own lack, and returned to their poems as I do a wound, repeatedly, that itches as it heals; as I do the time of day my loneliness lightens inexplicably and ceases to matter. So I come back, hoping for closeness. You may have seen me standing stock still on a sidewalk, in the way again, listening to another urging, it may seem to you in a generous moment. And I was. My voice was timbered with ghosts who were waiting to be born. You thought perhaps I’d had a stroke. All my words that are undoubtedly yours fizzled in a sun spot, and the gold green-blue circle you saw hover in my eyes, the circle of faces that now, since you looked, has captured your own, instead of desiring you must mean all trace of me has been erased. Or that I, mostly irretrievable, have forgotten my name and how to walk, and may never learn how to turn to those that are my sound again, with or without a hitch, a lurch, a leg that abandons me. But my friend, we were always walking from our first awkward steps toward someone we love or tried to love, toward a yellow butterfly that one day, in a grassy field welling with sunlight, jinxed through the air just out of reach as you have me and I have you.
Lawrence Wray’s work can be found in the anthology Verse Envisioned and in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, Presence, Poetry Salzburg Review, Indiana Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Dark Horse, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. His collection, The Night People Imagine, has twice been a finalist for the Antivenom Prize at Elixir Press. New work can be found in Coal Hill Review and Relief.
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