Zachariah Claypole White
To Write the Poem in which I Reckon with My OCD
The first stanza will be an image of grass,
grown tall in English summers. The speaker
is a child—perhaps four or five—the grandfather
lifts him like a trowel from damp earth;
teaches him to swim by parting the feathered stalks.
The poem should not explain—
you still tread that imagined water.
The second will be a list, seemingly unrelated:
a watch with no battery, a traffic jam
reimagined as birds, the bathtub.
None of these
should be symbolic.
The third stanza will introduce a new idea,
a troublesome memory:
a deer stumbling from your dented bumper;
the absent friend with beautiful fingers
and a piano-soft smile;
the letter she wrote, filled with cinnamon.
The fourth will twist a noun
into a verb’s gray suit and tie;
help it stand beneath history, guide
its fingers across church dust and psalm-thin paper.
No, you missed the funeral. Remember?
You are not writing for the dead.
The last stanza will begin again
in the grass. See how high it has grown
since last you visited;
how fearsome the blossoming
of absence.
To Be in the Time of Climate Change
after “To Be in a Time of War” by Etel Adnan
To wake up, to refuse the clock, to open the blinds and note the rain,
to think of buying a thicker jacket, to brew coffee, to ignore the phone,
to forget the coffee, to check the phone, to press screen to forehead
till one must surely crack.
To dress, to lose socks, to find them by the computer, to open
the computer, to illuminate winter-heavy hands, to check the news
and take a pill, to swallow that pill with water, to think
of water—its rise and absence.
To remember coffee, to pour it lukewarm into a thermos,
to need a new thermos, to step into the cold, to wonder if
it’s colder than last year, to shelter hands deep in pockets,
forgetting keys.
To admire the leaves, to imagine how many
will remain, to call a friend whose lover died last week,
to have no language worth the dial tone, to speak for hours
and not mention the news.
To google “climate change god news,” to misspell good,
to pray, to re-read the same article, to start a poem
for Stephen, to give up and take a second pill,
to call the pharmacy, to discover what insurance no longer covers.
To gather quarters for laundry, to check email then phone,
to read the killer was acquitted, to activate a credit card,
to watch robins dance above the tarmac, to name absence
a taste like salt and honey.
To sit in class, to argue craft and poetry, to read
that the Tuvalu minster spoke knee-deep from the sea,
to download a pdf of the accords, to make another cup
of coffee, to call home and promise to book a flight.
To book the flight, to worry at account balances
and the price of apples, to walk past the highway
and hate every car, to make a grocery list,
to ask your housemate for a ride.
To later undress, to run the shower too long,
to forget the towel, to insulate the windows
with duct tape, to order a second heater,
to wonder at the kindness of sky.
To lie in bed, to get another blanket, to remember
the five hundred dead under the heat dome,
to question that number, to google and arrive
at five hundred ninety-five, to discard the extra blanket.
To see the moon ripe and full, to hold
the world in a dead boy’s mouth, to kiss every ocean
and spit a curving downpour across the bedroom floor.
To hear the phone ring.
To say, yes
I will try writing
this all down.
In 1963, My Father Helps Build a Cyclotron, and Blacks Out Lower Manhattan
I have never seen a photo
of my father at fifteen
but
to accelerate a particle
a magnetic field must bend
its trajectory through
alternating charges,
by which I mean my father
held forgiveness in his throat,
grew windchimes
from hospital walls,
where, with hands fluent
in the language of birds,
he learned the radius of a body,
the edges of momentum.
Understand—
to speak the displaced
structure of an atom, to hold
an illness or son,
the magnetic field
must remain perpendicular
to the electric,
of course, he and I
are a spiral of song;
of course the city darkened
before his light.
Zachariah Claypole White was born and raised in North Carolina, and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2017, with a major in creative writing and a minor in English literature. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous publications, including Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Scalawag, Weird Horror, and The Hong Kong Review. His awards include Flying South's 2021 Best in Category for poetry and a nomination for a Pushcart Prize.
