Poem of the Week: Roger Reeves

Self-Portrait as Vincent Van Gogh
in the Asylum at Arles

The moths in the orchard squeal

with each pass of the mistral wind.

Yet the reapers and their scythes,

out beyond the pear trees, slay wheat

in sure columns. Christ

must have been made of shocks

of wheat. When they lashed him,

four bundles of fine yellow burst forth

from each welt. And the women,

tarrying as they do now behind the swing

and chuff of the reapers' blades,

gathered and plaited the stray pieces

of wheat falling from his hips into braids,

long braids that would bind a tattered sail-

cloth over his yellow mouth, yellow feet.

Oh to be bound by one's own blood

like a burlap sack cinched around the neck

with a leather belt. Father forgive me

for the moths shrieking in the orchard

of my mouth. Forgive the rattle and clatter

of wings inside the blue of my brain.

Even if these iron bars queer a field,

queer a woman standing too close to a reaper's blade,

a half-moon hung and wholly harsh,

even if this woman, burdened like a spine

carrying a head and a basket of rocks,

forgets the flaw of a well-sharpened tool,

let her not mistake my whimper and warning

for the honk of a goose in heat. Father,

she is not made like our savior,

of straw, of a coarse tender. Nothing will stop

when her blood runs along a furrow.

The sun will not sag with a red scowl.

The field will not refuse water. Father,

I am unsure of what I am-

a fragrant mistral wind or a pile of moths' heads

at the foot of a pear tree. Father,

give me a scythe. Father, let me decide.

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From King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).

Used with permission.

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Roger Reeves's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. Reeves was awarded a 2014-2015 Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a 2014 Pushcart Prize, a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, King Me, his first book of poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2013. King Me has been awarded the 2014 Larry Levis Reading Prize by the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. He is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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