A Poem by Robert Wexelblatt

Gnomic Song
 
Belly of a blue-scaled fish,
tigrous eye, unblinking, wide,
an ink-stained mirror on a dish,
to show, or hold, what sages hide.

Arcanae in roots of heather,
chthonous rumbling under clods:
if gods didn’t make the weather,
surely weather made the gods.

Rivers wrap a smooth white stone,
storms blow soft through hollow reeds,
interpenetrating bone,
blood and marrow, flesh and seeds.

Go pluck pits from brittle pods,
songs from lungs fretted with feather.
If weather hasn’t made the gods,
Surely gods have made the weather.


Robert Wexelblatt is professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play; his recent novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction and a short novel, Losses, is due out later this year.