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Retrograde: Echoes From A Previous Chapter


If only the third wish hadn't been squandered on more wine
for the village feast, or the second on scarlet plumes
for the black-eyed dray. Surely this life's tasks
meet a good end when the next life's begin.

Best wish, first wish: for a cold to crack the gallows
with a weight of ice. At rope's end, the corpse,
like a plucked goose, ticks by slow degrees toward dawn.

She watched the gibbet snap in a red rim of light. No
further grantings. Morning's too-lateness. Her pipe empty,
and no smoke to warn the villagers of her dreams' demise.

If only she could set back the hours, the days. Before
The Feast. Before Adam and Eve, before love and animals
and small green lands spit up by the sea.

Without one's wishes a dangling man reverts to plain
type. Pages flutter and whisk him away. In the chill
of his shadow came a wind and the pendulum's tick . . .
tick that word again. We scorn redundancy.

Nance Van Winckel
New Letters
Volume 69, Number 1
2002