Wilson Wiley Variations — Poetry
Poetry
Wilson Wiley Variations
Thoreau Lovell
ISBN: 978-1-7324369-1-6
96 pages, 4.25"x 7", Perfect Bound
Pub Date: 1/15/19
Wilson Wiley Variations (free PDF)
An extraordinary work of imagination that brings the losses of everyday life and death into a field of perception that opens the underlying tenets of oft hidden languages of love. It’s a manifestation of a poetry we need—uncovering the layers of invisible perception which can distort; yet in the hands of a master ultimately reveal an awesome beauty of a redemptive freeing of what it means to be alive, and finally home: “the outline of a letter that becomes home. / An illegible page between skin and sky.” Thoreau Lovell’s Wilson Wiley Variations creates a naming that itself becomes light.
John High, Author of Vanishing Acts (Talisman House)
Hiding out in Desire
At the moment of creation, Wiley’s desire
is music that snaps time’s step.
A) If he pulls out a gun and shoots his father
he takes a new name.
B) Of all the countries in the world, not of any.
His single-hatted self made multiple.
Handclaps ricocheting through
the darkened room.
Shrill, grating voices, smoothed together.
O moon too empty for words.
This rhythmic lie.
Radio and television, short wave and satellite,
canceling news struck by tongue.
Wiley starts out where truck-rust turns
water red. Escaping with his stolen name.
A) If he gives her an apple, she is the organic
source of his passion.
B) If the father refuses to die, the genre
is slapstick horror.
A wobbly blue shade fleeing gray
as memory flees the small fire
Wiley’s necessity makes.
No place is place enough for Wiley.
He sits very still and shakes his written head
like a ragged melody in the wind.
Wiley wants degrees of black broadcast
across the sky. He wants to want.
Hiding out in desire
keeping it close to his skin
for the long sea voyage crossing.
A) Of all the lies to be told, why this one?
B) A mountain Name piles up over time.
Wiley would gladly exchange his body
for her stories of bravery and good bread.
His mother is water. She’s muddy ground.
What love, reads Wiley,
at the moment of creation?
Then all the doors blow open.Thoreau Lovell is a poet and fiction writer originally from Fresno, California, currently living in Berkeley with his wife and two daughters. His most recent book is Wilson Wiley Variations (Wet Cement Press). He is also the author of a book of prose poems, Public Servant (Toehold Books); and a book of poetry, Amnesia’s Diary (Ex Nihilo Press). He worked for many years in the J. Paul Leonard Library at San Francisco State University, primarily as an administrator responsible for technology and collection access. He was also an editor at Five Fingers Review/Press. Recently he left the University and is a stay-at-home writer and editor at Wet Cement Press. More information at thoreaulovell.com
