Words Like These
Bruce Wetteroth
 

Always Wetteroth's vision is a world of affect.He feels -- we feel -- the world. And he recognizes its evanescence. "Look too hard and we all vanish," one poem says. But the poems are marked by a haunting kind of wonder at it, too: the careful, determined observation of things and sequences until a window opens for an instant and we see suddenly into the rich (and often disturbing) inner life -- of nature, of ourselves: all glimpsed in wonder, amazement, love, and fear. But never in disbelief. For this(we feel in these poems) is the real, the secret life we all, lost and adrift in this world of wonder lead.
 
 

        Life in Progress
 

This morning the sun walked into the house
like a blind man. I held my breath.
There was something so fragile in the room,
traced over the carpet from the window frame,
the rocking chair, like a shadowgraph
of some structure in a higher dimension
than I could envision or the cat suspect,
washing herself right in the middle of it.

Today I petted a skunk: a dry coarse wool;
a restlessness in the bony back;
an absence of mind as he nibbled my fingers,
then hurried to pry open a cabinet, being nocturnal.
The naturalist hauled him out for the next visitors.
I thought she too would rather be left alone.
I watched a ratsnake coiling on itself,
an exercise in perpetual motion; a turtle
sitting on a rock in its glass case
with blinking eyelids and a hostile expression,
captive animals like people stricken,
dazed by the light, crawling . . .

We drove from Burr Oak to McConnellsville,
a sleepy town on Sunday afternoon,
among those places we visit once
and then it is as if we had never been there,
back by way of Amesville to a houseful
of obligations: tax forms treated
with an invisible explosive,
dangerous to handle if you've not first
sighed, and put the creatures in their places.
Making sense of things can be like an
assassination: no evidence will quiet every suspicion.

64 Pages
List price $10.95/$5.95: contact The Ohio Review for availability
Ohio Review Books Contemporary Poetry Series
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