Blackbird Archive
← v18n1, Spring 2019
Poetry · Volume 18, Number 1

The Lost Art of Piping Down

Edward Mayes

We had long admired the sheen and

The silence of the two pomegranates

In the blue bowl, and will that blue

Bowl not crack with its happiness, its

Surprise at holding so openly what is

In it, and the absence of the seed inside

The stone, and the stone inside

The peach, and the pick in the tool shed

Without its handle or the handle cracked,

And the butcher paper smooth in its

Rolls, the aperitivo drowning in ice on

The green table, the aspergilla emptying

Of their holy water, and the water

Quietly washed in itself, the calm pile

Of agitators in the junkyard, and names

Dropping on the shag rugs, hidden in

Whispers, and the helicopters now

Not chopping up air, the air whole,

The air litmussed and gleaming, and

We stay on the same pages for hours,

And the days of the same pages get

Longer, and the perquisites of this our

Last life, that we can still feel like crawling,

That the upkeep cancels out the downturn,

That we are lucidity, fingers over lips,

The grace given so that we may one day speak.

domestic-lifetimeart
Edward Mayes

Edward Mayes is the author of five books of poetry including Works and Days (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), winner of the Associated Writing Programs Prize for Poetry, and First Language (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), winner of the Juniper Prize. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review , The Best American Poetry , The Gettysburg Review , Harvard Review , The Kenyon Review , The Massachusetts Review , The New Yorker , The Southern Review , and Poetry , among others. He is also the coauthor, with his wife Frances Mayes, of three books about Tuscany: In Tuscany (Broadway Books, 2000), Bringing Tuscany Home (Broadway Books, 2004), and The Tuscan Sun Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2012). Mayes is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and both the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award and the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He previously served as the director of the creative writing program at Santa Clara University. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and Cortona, Italy. Photo by Steven Rothfeld