Two
poems from George Witte's Deniability
followed
by a note on the author
Deniability
A leak
implies without affirming fact;
there’s wiggle room should details contradict,
events
reverse themselves, a photograph
prove forged. Whose grasp of evidence is firm
enough
to verify its chain, each link
unblemished by the bottom muck of time?
Consider
your child’s birth certificate,
Mom’s recipes, amendments to your
will –
if you’ve lost these then how’s intelligence
know
missile shed from shadow, extract sense
from cellphone intercepts where coded
threat’s
expressed as wedding plans? Network anchors
bargain ratings
higher, negotiate
for access to exclusive video.
Officials
fashion lullaby from lie,
commitment into exit strategy
conveyed in semaphore,
averted eyes
a silent language undercutting words.
Truth’s relative
as beauty, circumstance
our ever-shifting standard, as an urn’s
exhumed
pastoral darkens to reveal
a priest receiving sacrificial girls
with oil
and fire, their moistened limbs consigned
to greater good, the glaze that purifies.
You
turn it, passerby, obliged to none,
witness without testimony, faint sough
of
bone and ash inside this artifact
the only evidence you can’t deny.
Haptic
A touch
– you turn, too late to greet it –
brings back the year when such
were
commonplace, or said to be.
Who knew? If you heeded newsboys
robed in ulsters,
Cassandran,
then you believed apocalypse
a nudge away, the world
one
nickel’s worth of mineral
from eternity, and this extra sense
a sign
or summons from the dead come back
to mock their jailers into panic.
If
not – you cleaved to hope, and flourished –
then all went on. Through
slush,
through silver sun, the city
turning on itself in stalled ballet
no
traffic cop could choreograph,
you walked to work. The touches spread
from
one to one like ripples in a pond
flooding avenues with portent
and still
you walked, or waded rather,
waiting for the day
when you would whirl, bewildered
and afraid.
It
comes – you turn, too late to greet
or fend it off – but nothing
happens:
no gun, no wizened nightmare twin
clawing to your back. Every corner
seems
another threshold, as though
you carry something delicate
from block to
block toward home,
a bride perhaps, or prayer answered,
or long forgotten
promise now fulfilled.
That year comes true;
you feel the world hang fire,
and hold.
©
George
Witte’s first collection of poems, The Apparitioners, was published
in 2005 by Three Rail Press (www.threerailpress.com). His work has appeared widely
in journals, including The Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Poetry,
Southwest Review, and Virginia Quarterly, and in the 2007 edition of
Best American Poetry, edited by Heather McHugh. He was awarded Poetry’s
Frederick Bock Prize for a group of poems, and received a fellowship from the
New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State. For twenty four years
he has worked in book publishing at St. Martin’s Press, where he is now editor
in chief. He lives with his wife and their two daughters in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
The poems on Waywiser’s web page are drawn from a newly-completed manuscript,
now in search of a publisher.
"Deniability" first appeared in Boulevard;
"Haptic" first appeared in Shenandoah.
