canyon market
by Rex Wilder
September 2021
In the heralded fresh bright blue sky
of day you can’t see a single star,
unless it’s tenancy of memory, or sparkling
from the end of a sharp pencil
against a lined page. Ripeness is
what our lives stand in line for,
make lines out of, not the spring of youth
long before the juicy harvest. Scars
are the ladder-rungs of desire. Lived-
through, our complete instructions
from first breath through the last in large
sweet type. We’re never so young
as before we die says the sweet peach,
with its kind give.
“canyon market” is from Wilder’s fourth (and forthcoming) volume Summer Break, which refers to both a mental breakdown and a life-affirming pivot in his life. He has poems in TLS, Poetry, Poetry Ireland, New Republic, National Review, The New Criterion, and many of the best reviews and anthologies, including Knopf’s celebrated pandemic collection, Together in a Sudden Strangeness.