09-28-07​

Ed Pavlic

Masqualéro
              -after Miles

There’s plenty that think we’re twins.  By 18
  we’d both wished secretly that it was true,
     & that it wasn’t.  Since we were 9

we met here on stealth banks of August,
  each year another Savior & sweet thanks be
     to Jesus for that old rowboat.

Remember my instructions when we met?
  I’d bent a coffee can into a scoop to hunt
     the mud banks for crawfish.  “The whole

trick with blue pinchers is getting in behind
  without setting off a stir on their tail.”  Now
     we’re getting to be His age.  But apart

from watches & sky dates, you know how to find me
  when my head’s full of scuppernong blossoms.
     So we cast off past wisteria

& into night silk beyond the river’s edge.  Empty skins
  of tree snakes, ash vibrissa, draw the canopy.
     Tangles of moss wisp past my cheeks,

fall out of a lullaby.  No moon.  If I spark my lighter,
  willows young & old pretend they don’t breathe
     the dark, don’t slip thru nights

in tangos with cypress & Saturn tuned in to bent
  underwater reeds.  Posed they stand like a big-city
     crowd at a bust stop, & just reach

off the bank for elbow room.  Come out that white blouse
  & upside down, you watch open lilies fall away,
     a bird’s eye vision

of your daddy’s parachute into the Mekong Delta.
  A back bend arched over the bow, your bare torso slips
     thru a summer breeze, cuts

a hush in the cicada din.  A pale gash torn past my lips
  leaves the night open.  Light-plays off my chrome
     Zippo.  Hershey’s kisses harden

into rose thorns dense as a shut eye’s faith in tarot.
  My name, dry salt on an arch-smooth eyebrow,
     vanishes into steamed woods & gut-heavy

air like sweat into a prayer for rain.  We take on water
  in each Decatur Street groan for Mercy.  It’s far too late,
     slipway a damned sight too steep

for Esperanto or one-eyed jacks.  To pull the moon
  back with cracked oars curved like tusks, you’d better
     mean it.  It’s about time for round two.

Oceanus descends with an acetylene tear & dreams
  of a blue tip, a cool flame; the other eye’s been gone
     for years, blind & lid turned cold side out.

-from Paragh of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, celebrated with permission of the poet

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"A poem exists. One part of a poem exists when it answers a need in the author. Something has to happen while writing, out of boltblue, that answers a question that didn’t exist in the mind until the answer identified it. Another part of a poem exists when that accident in the author’s body answers something in the need of a reader. I think readers and writers both come to poetry out of a need distinct from the ways we approach various kinds of prose. I think we come to it closer to the way musicians and listeners come to music or the way a painter and a viewer approach a canvas. Poems are made of language held in tension with its non-verbal properties. When an experience can be made to speak, when it can be literally voiced, in a way that opens it up (rather than sums it up) into what’s behind it, into what surrounds it, that can last I think. It’s similar to what makes a song seem to mean more than what the story of the words tell. I think that lasts, but it can’t be requisitioned or controlled. It’s in the way one can instantly come to depend on the results of an accident. The best parts of poems are the results of the right accidents." -read full interview here​​

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Author of more than a dozen books and pieces in over sixty magazines, Ed Pavlić is an American writer whose work travels across—often blurring—genres: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and scholarship. Centered in African American and diasporic life and culture, most of his work explores racial dynamics in the experiences of persons—fictive, actual, historical and contemporary—whose placement and perspectives aren’t neatly classifiable in contemporary vocabularies, theirs or ours. His awards include The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Award (2001), The National Poetry Series Open Competition (2012, 2014), The Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writer’s Association (2009, 2023), and the Darwin Turner Memorial Award from African American Review (1997). He is Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia and lives in Athens, GA with his family.