Mathew Weitman
Mathew Weitman's poetry can be found in Alaska Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, The Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the AWP Kurt Brown Prize in Poetry, the Inprint Verlaine Prize for Poetry, and is a two-time Pushcart nominee. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD in critical poetics at the University of Houston where he is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow and a poetry editor for Gulf Coast. He can be found at mathewweitman.com.
FLATLAND
How beautiful and soulless is the city
on this unmailed postcard
with its iconic view from nowhere
a tourist searches for but never finds
One cloud loiters above the esplanade
where beneath the broken statues
time is etherized at a summer picnic--
children wait in eternity
for ginger ale, cake
To the left the ocean’s boring
with enlightened stillness:
no tidal wave threatens the cathedral’s stories of bearded men
who cannot bear to look at the light
passing through their stained-glass bodies
I’d never tell you the first part of my life
was spent weeping, or in prayer
because it isn’t true
and I’d rather lie about other things
What is most arresting is the indication of movement:
bent branches above café tables
the wind’s code is glorious & simple
but the skyline is a language
one acquires in lecture halls
There is a riverine darkness in certain windows
of the houses on the right
suggesting absence or intimacy:
what happens beyond the postcard
lends a dimensionality I am not qualified to speak about--
remember when you stopped loving me
after I confused the indefinite with the infinite at the diner
Look:
in the distance fishermen are napping
after casting their nets
How beautiful and soulless is the city
on this unmailed postcard
with its iconic view from nowhere
a tourist searches for but never finds
One cloud loiters above the esplanade
where beneath the broken statues
time is etherized at a summer picnic--
children wait in eternity
for ginger ale, cake
To the left the ocean’s boring
with enlightened stillness:
no tidal wave threatens the cathedral’s stories of bearded men
who cannot bear to look at the light
passing through their stained-glass bodies
I’d never tell you the first part of my life
was spent weeping, or in prayer
because it isn’t true
and I’d rather lie about other things
What is most arresting is the indication of movement:
bent branches above café tables
the wind’s code is glorious & simple
but the skyline is a language
one acquires in lecture halls
There is a riverine darkness in certain windows
of the houses on the right
suggesting absence or intimacy:
what happens beyond the postcard
lends a dimensionality I am not qualified to speak about--
remember when you stopped loving me
after I confused the indefinite with the infinite at the diner
Look:
in the distance fishermen are napping
after casting their nets
Book Recommendations:
- How Poems Get Made, James Longenbach
- The Malevolent Volume, Justin Philip Reed
- 1 x 1, e e cummings
- The Glass Constellation, Arthur Sze
- Sleeping with the Dictionary, Harryette Mullen