"The Celebrated Colors of the Local Sunsets" by Matthew Wimberley

[View this email on a browser]( [Forward to a friend]( [facebook-icon]( [tumblr-icon]( [twitter-icon]( September 23, 2019 [The Celebrated Colors of the Local Sunsets]( [Matthew Wimberley]( The day feels as thin as the letters fading from half a can of spray paint a decade ago on the brick wall of the closed down Suder Feed Supply where we used to skateboard and think of all the crimes the police could punish us with for being poor, and teenagers, for wearing skin-tight jeans and growing our hair like a girl’s, for almost anything— at least it felt like it then. I can’t imagine home without thinking of the past and the faintest stir of indignation. It’s beside the point. Today, I’m revisiting Miłosz with a pen pressed to the pages making notes in the margins. In 1987, in Berkeley, he is doing the same, and thinking back on the end of his countries, their “posthumous existence.” Like him I know a place I can’t return to, and without much imagination can picture everything coming apart, one way or another. When I imagine how it might go, it is just like this: I am memorizing bird calls and wild plants which become a blur at the far edge of my yard, their Latin names tangled in my mouth. Didn’t I already show you this? The country at twilight and a far-off darkness of pines, a deep red sky imagined for this page. What I left out wasn’t meant to be remarkable— a bruise faded from the surface, the wounds buried like overwintered wasps plotting assassinations beneath the snow. So let’s see if I can draw it into focus, like the truant daydreaming in class suddenly with something to say— the one end I know complete. Once, I thanked my father for the gift of this life, something he didn’t hear. It was two years before he died and he was high on the translucent painkillers the hospital ordered to keep him comfortable after surgery. It was as real as anything I ever told him. I stood over him in the hospital bed and traced the outline of his body under the gown, the collar and hip bones, his stomach, his penis, and balls, numbered the black stars printed on the cotton and listened to him breathe, mouth open, just so, a way into the hive growing in his chest. He didn’t hear, and then, he couldn’t. In those years, I barely spoke to him and now not an hour can pass I don’t hear him, now that what he has to say is always final, always a last word. And Miłosz is buried in Kraków and my father has entered eternity as ash, and I am certain what doesn’t last lasts—Hydrangea quercifolia, Hypericum densiflorum, Solidago rugosa [Like this on Facebook]( [Share via Twitter]( Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Wimberley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 23, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. ["The Celebrated Colors of the Local Sunsets" by Matthew Wimberley]( About This Poem “‘The Celebrated Colors of the Local Sunsets’ was written between the fall of 2017 and late spring of 2018. I was reading [Czeslaw Miłosz](’s A Year of the Hunter and his language concerning the end of his home countries were and are particularly poignant. His sense of loss resonated with me as I was working to complete All the Great Territories, which confronts my relationship with my father who died in 2012. I finished the poem on my porch in early May 2017, one morning while I was doing the work described in the poem—identifying a few birds and the new flowers beginning to open up.” —Matthew Wimberley [Matthew Wimberley]( Matthew Wimberley is the author of All the Great Territories (SIU, 2020) and is an assistant professor of English at Lees-Mcrae College in Banner Elk, North Carolina, where he lives. [more-at-poets]( [All the Great Territories]( Poetry by Wimberley [All the Great Territories]( (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020) “A Song on the End of the World” by Czeslaw Milosz [read-more]( “Little Father” by Li-Young Lee [read-more]( “Equinox” by Elizabeth Alexander [read-more]( September Guest Editor: Eduardo C. Corral Thanks to [Eduardo C. Corral](, author of Guillotine, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2020, who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a [Q&A with Corral]( about his curatorial approach this month and find out more about our [guest editors for the year.]( Your Support Makes Poem-a-Day Possible Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today’s poets each weekday morning. This free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on the weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. 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