paper • 76 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-935536-63-5
The Man with Many Pens
Jonathan Wells
The Man with Many Pens is about love—“a love that smells so much like blood”—and song—“a song that the oak leaves will not finish.” These poems examine how a single love or a single song contains multiple personalities and contradictory forces, tensions and concordances. Beneath those poems such as “The Man with Many Pens,” “The Six-Armed Musician” and others that display the multiple complex emotions of love, there is a more naked, personal narrative.
“Love’s Body”, from The Man with Many Pens:
Love gives all its reasons as if they were terms for peace. Love is this but not that that but not this. Love as it always was. But there is no peace in the mountain cleft where the fruit bats scatter from the light. There is no peace in the hollow when heat snuffs night's blue candle. The outline of brown leaves on the beach is the wind's body. A crow is squawking at the sun and the screech itself is dawn. Let me hear every perfect note. How I loved that jasper morning.
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