I’d like a Sunday

like a Mary Oliver

poem, with a few

 

perfect words and

lots of white space,

and paper with

 

a high rag content

and maybe some

righteous soy-based ink.

 

It would be a leaf

in one of her spare

little collections, with

 

a fine old lithograph

from the public domain

on the cover,

 

one that recalled the idyllic

Transcendentalist woods

of Thoreau and Emerson

 

and John Muir.

I’d like to stare

at the few

 

perfect words

close up with

my glasses off

 

and appreciate the clean

edges of the fine

big print and feel

 

like I’m in church,

the good part, when

the church is empty

 

and there’s only

silence and the sound

of my own breath.

 

 

by Will Walker

 

Will’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alabama Literary Review, Bark, Crack the Spine, Forge, Passager, Pennsylvania English, Rougarou, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Slow Trains, Studio One, and Westview. His chapbook, Carrying Water, was published by Pudding House Press, and his full-length collection, Wednesday After Lunch, is a Blue Light Press Book Award Winner (2008). He received a bachelor’s degree in English history and literature from Harvard University, and over the last decade, he has attended numerous writing workshops with Marie Howe, Thea Sullivan, Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky, Allen Shapiro, and Mark Doty. Will was also an editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and when not putting pen to paper, he enjoys placing bow on string and playing the cello.

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