W.F. LANTRY





diecimila.
             image: piermario


On Possibilities

                "I shall unlearn feeling,
                unlearn my gift"
                                -Walcott


It is the swirling of currents
around her body that makes me
think of this: O, to be that water,
to be that wind through her hair,
the light glinting unpatterned around her face,
to simply be.

And I find myself fighting against
my own desire to make the vision art,
my own learned wish to sing.
What was handed to me
at some unknown moment over years-
who will take it, now, from my hands?

And she, there, in the small waves of her own making
laughs with a joy I almost know,
turning to me as I watch,
the small drops of water reluctant to leave her skin
but falling around her in sunlight
falling onto my hands.







W.F. Lantry, a native of San Diego, received his Licence and Maîtrise from L’Université de Nice, M.A. in English from Boston University, and PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He is the recipient of the Paris/Atlantic Young Writers Award, and in 2010 won the Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (in Israel), the Crucible Poetry Prize, theCutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize and the Birmingham-Southern College National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Prairie Fire, Asian Cha, Blip Magazine, Gulf Coast and Aesthetica. His recently published chapbook, The Language of Birds (Finishing Line Press 2011), is a lyric retelling of Attar's The Conference of the Birds. He currently works in Washington, DC and is a contributing editor of Umbrella Journal. His website is wflantry.com.