On the Exchange of Doves

I  am  weary  of  my  own  death,  its  flagrant  hospitality,  the  stone  mug  in  which  it proffers the best cocoa. Photographs of obscure ancestors line its mantelpiece; bits of cut glass litter death’s settee. I have come here to exchange doves with my death, and already I am sick to the spleen of death, of doves. Take it, just take it, I say, thrusting the wire cage I hold towards my death: I don’t want your dove, I don’t want any doves. But my death says nothing. It is busy sorting pearls & teeth from polished grains of rice. There is no sign of my death’s dove, for which I’ve come anywhere in the room. Take it, I say again. Then my death looks up at me, its gaze like an altar set in a pine forest in some distant north known for brutal palaces. And I know, suddenly, where the doves come from, where the outcasts lathe their compact stars. 

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G.C. Waldrep’s  most recent books are The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021) and feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.  Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University.