dead-ends and blue highways hoarse
with the whisper of wind, dust,
wood, bone, memory—the grist

of solitude stirred up
the morning you woke determined
to pluck the sun from God’s thigh

as he passed, full-stride,
over this side of town. That’s
how Jacob got new-named, you say

when the story comes up with friends—
and strangers, for that matter.
Like when you were painting

plein air roadscapes outside Redmond
and you used it to ply conversation
with the breeze as she watched you

seduce landscape from ripples of soul
stirred by her sigh. Yes, you say,
that’s how Jacob got new-named.

Nevermind it was his hip flicked
out of joint when the angel
stopped wrestling fair, wrested God

from Israel’s shank. Nevermind
your layover in Peniel via Genesis
left sand in the visions you put on

and off like shoes at Mnemosyne’s
fire ring. Nevermind that won’t earn you
a cross-reference from “Jacob (see

Israel)” in God’s Almanac
of New Names: From Michael (see
Adam) to the Present. Nevermind

God hasn’t appended his reputation
to your presence on these roads
supple as a cricket’s chirr

from the cleft between landscape
and soul, soul and skin, skin
and the palette you’ve charted

like desire’s ramble and catch
down the back roads and canyons
of memory.
______________________________________________________________________

“Landscape, with a Cricket’s Chirr” is an ekphrastic poem in response to a series of roadscapes by J. Kirk Richards.

To read Tyler’s bio and more of his poetry on WIZ, go here.

*non-contest submission*

your pushbike, your liahona—with fingers like
the fingers of Doré’s sun. Sift marrow

until you feel soil part, feel the fern press its head
through mist then flatten against sudden emptiness.

Until you can roam sky without tripping on God’s
hem, can cloak in light

without singeing every shadow to ash, without
blinding yourself as you trace the cloudfire to dusk.

____________________________________________________________________

To read more of Tyler’s poetry on WIZ, go here, here, here, here, and here.

*non-contest submission*

Self portrait with closed eyes

like a brumal serpent
listening to Earth

shed her crystalline

skin, slip off her chill
at dawn’s seductions

supple as hibernacula

warm with bodies
slendering into instinct

and appetite—Eden’s

infinite metaphors
sidled up to God’s breast,

areola iron on the tongue,

milk rich from desire’s simmer
and slow burn, the flame

set low so not to sear the soul

still this side of vision, lurking
like the mourning dove’s

anti-climactic elegies

teasing Eve from her
backwoods mythology

heavy with temptation’s

pome and tang and the rasp
of cherubim wings strung like

words along Lucifer’s tongue

as he conjures shame from
her constant wound—fig

weeping matins in Eden’s half-

light while Adam snores
downwind, only stirs when

she’s roused scent enough

to slip into his dreams
as the rib slipped from his side

the morning God stopped by

and found the basket of figs
he’d left last visit

still sitting on the altar,

thrumming with June Bugs
undone in the eating, mad

with the zephyr’s rasp

through the scales of the constrictor
stretched at sleeping Adam’s side.

_______________________________________________________________________

“Self portrait with closed eyes” is Tyler’s ekphrastic response to the painting “Self Portrait with Eyes Closed” by J. Kirk Richards that appears at the tip-top of the poem.

For Tyler’s bio and links to more of his poems published on WIZ, go here.

2. 16 July 2003: Our First
The day Sidney was born,
her water came
on the bathroom floor. As I’d layered
a towel to soak the spill, my wife bent
over the head to catch any leaks, waiting
for labor to turn her insides
out.

3. New Mother
Sitting beside
the ashen body of her stillborn
son, waiting
for the cry that never came,
she bent
her breath across his chest, warming the empty layers.

4. 12 February 2006, 2:23 AM: Our Second
Rising through layers
of sleep into wet sheets, she’d stood beside
our bed, questioned her continence while bending
lamp light across the spill. “Looks like your birthday
present’s coming,”
I’d said as she winced at the onset of labor’s weight.

5. Sarah
As she wearied beneath the weight
time layered
on her womb, he came
to her. Inside
the tent, a moonbeam gave birth
to galaxies as her universe bent

to God’s touch.

6. On the Lake
Ripples bend
the water’s crimson weight,
distorting autumn’s birth
with each stroke layered
on stroke. Reaching over the canoe’s east side,
our nine month daughter watches her reflection go and come.

7. Solstice
Rereading “The Second Coming” on a winter night, birds bending
circles inside Yeats’ words as the tide spanning generations waits
to drown my own, I draw the poet’s layered veil and fall into Christ’s crimson birth.

______________________________________________________________________

Tyler Chadwick is a doctoral candidate in English & the Teaching of English at Idaho State University. He spends his time husbanding his wife, Jessica; fathering four little girls; teaching writing foundations online for Brigham Young University-Idaho; reading; writing; and researching contemporary American poetry. He’s also an avid runner. His poems have appeared in Metaphor, Dialogue, Irreantum, Salome, Black Rock & Sage, and The Victorian Violet Press Poetry Journal. In 2009, he received the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize and in 2010 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Visit Tyler’s blog Chasing the Long White Cloud.  To see other poems he has published on WIZ, go here, here, here, here, here, here, and last, but not least, here.

crimson-honey sky
across the Hokianga
crimson-honey tide
but no waka to pierce
the bay’s narrow hips

*

crimson-honey sand
across the Hokianga
crimson-honey sky
but only one cumulus
to lick the bay’s narrow tongue

*

crimson-honey night
across the Hokianga
but no moon
to walk empty shores
sip crimson-honey tea

________________________________________________________________

For Tyler’s bio and other Spring Poetry Runoff contributions, click here and here.

*Non-contest submission*

both in white sarong
I bend you through the font
watch fabric rise
on water troubled
by the currents of death

______________________________________________________________

Mateu, Matem (Gilbertese): “my death, your death.”

_____________________________________________________________

For Tyler’s bio and his other submission to the Spring Poetry Runoff, go here.

*Non-contest submission*

E noho:
I see hunger squirm beneath
your skin. Break bread. Dip it in butter
heavy as afterbirth. Let the excess glide
across your tongue, drop
into the well of appetite, filled with milk
fresh from the coupled Void. Sidle toward
the breast. Press between her skin and his.
Join the sextuplet gods waiting to suckle,
mouths wide against emptiness,
hunger sliding between lips chapped
from too long in the womb—

ora mate ora mate ora
Ply your flesh
in this orgy of mythologies. Mix spittle
with the grammar of desire
shorn from Adam’s side. Slip on
this red clay like spirit slips on nakedness.
An infant its mother’s breast. Meaning,
the itch always just out of reach. Slide
from this amniotic tide into the metaphor
christened body. Meaning movement.
Meaning legion. Meaning drink
from this cup and we’ll help you forget to

breathe.

______________________________________________________________

Definitions (from Māori Dictionary Online: http://www.maoridictionary.co.nz/):

Te Kore (pronounced “teh KO-reh”): (n.) realm of potential being, The Void.

Haere Mai (pronounced “HI-reh MY”): (interjection) “Come here!” or “Welcome!”; a greeting.

E noho (pronounced “EH no-HO”): (v.) sit, stay, remain, settle, dwell, live, inhabit, reside.

Ora (pronounced “OH-ruh”): (stative) be alive, well, safe, cured, recovered, healthy, fit; the principle of life.

Mate (pronounced “MAH-teh”): (stative) be dead, sick, ill, ailing, overcome, beaten, defeated, in want of, lacking, overcome, deeply in love; the principle of death.

______________________________________________________________

Tyler Chadwick lives in Idaho with his wife, their three daughters, and their Miniature Schnauzer. His poetry has appeared in Metaphor, Dialogue, Irreantum, Salome Magazine, Black Rock & Sage, and on WIZ (here and here) and AMV (here and here) and many of his poems and his Mormon Poetry Project can be found on his personal blog.

*Non-contest submission*

I’ve been neglecting what it takes
to piece together dawn from old
snapshots and reminiscence faded
as the blush from Adam’s skin

when God’s question stunned
the garden and he slipped with Eve into
the shadow of God’s voice, their shame
a stand of trees backlit by cherubim

come hounds a-bay to flush them into
death, sin, recognition, solitude,
a blood-drunk field mantle deep with sweat
and sorrow, soil thick with the afterbirth

of myth and tectonic histories, pieces
of a puzzle that shift in bed as I
try to number them one, two, three,
no, one, two… one

edges ragged as the blanket Cain has
carried since Eve weaned him from the teat
and he found his thumb to replace it,
but not enough to fill his hunger, not

enough to keep serpents from burrowing
into his need, from shedding that rag
like yesterday’s skin, from slipping him
the switchblade he used to quarter the fruit

he knew had ripened in Mother’s womb,
the harvest he’ll never find as he works
his spittle and excrement field into bodies
with his hands red as stygian clay.

_____________________________________________________________

Tyler Chadwick lives in Idaho with his wife, their three daughters, and their Miniature Schnauzer. His poetry has appeared in Metaphor, Dialogue, Irreantum, Salome Magazine, Black Rock & Sage, and on WIZ (here and here) and AMV (here and here) and many of his poems and his Mormon Poetry Project can be found on his personal blog. 

Be sure to click into the link at the head of the post to see the inspiration for Tyler’s poem, J. Kirk Richards’ painting, “Stand of Trees.”

The crow lays roadside,
fully dead, its swollen body
trimmed with grass. Its head,

cropped with beads of dew,
cocks awkwardly to one side,
the top eye muting the sky

in a flat, milky gaze, beak
cracked in perpetual “caw,”
though no sound escapes

save the rasp of leaves
tripped by the wind
through this wooded suburban lull.

___________________________________________________________

Originally published in Black Rock & Sage 9 (2009).

Tyler is a frequent contributor to Wilderness Interface Zone.  His bio plus links to his personal blog and to some of his posts at A Motley Vision can be found here (scroll to end).

Th.
Nephi Anderson (via Th.’s gravelly voice)
Mark Bennion
Tyler Chadwick
greenfrog
green mormon architect
Elizabeth R.

And, of course, many thanks to WIZ’s loyal readers and commenters.

I appreciate each writer’s help keeping People Month on WIZ interesting and fun.  We’ll do it again next year (maybe earlier), so start drawing up your People Month writing plans now.