The night I woke to find the sheets wet from you,
like a man cast up on the beach,
I hurried you off to the shower to cool you down,
...
A story: There was a cow in the road, struck by a semi--
half-moon of carcass and jutting legs, eyes
already milky with dust and snow, rolled upward
...
My privilege and my proof, pressing your eternal skin to mine—
I feel your fingers touching down on the crown of my head
where I pray they remain during this life and in the next.
...
Mark Wunderlich (1968 – ) is an American poet. He was born in Winona, Minnesota and grew up in a rural setting near the town of Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College's Institute for German Studies, before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where he studied English and German literature. After moving to New York City, he attended Columbia University from which he received an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree. Mark Wunderlich has published two collections of poetry, most recently Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf Press, 2004). He worked on his first book, The Anchorage, as his MFA thesis at Columbia University and finished it while living in Provincetown, Massachusetts. There he was friends with the poet Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006). A third book of poems, The Earth Avails, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. Wunderlich has published individual poems, essays, reviews and interviews in the Paris Review, Yale Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Fence and AGNI. Wunderlich has taught at Stanford, San Francisco State University, Ohio University, Barnard College, and Columbia University. Since 2004, he has been a member of the literature faculty at Bennington College in Vermont, where he is also a member of the faculty of the Graduate Writing Seminars. He lives in New York's Hudson River Valley near the town of Catskill.)
The Bruise Of This
The night I woke to find the sheets wet from you,
like a man cast up on the beach,
I hurried you off to the shower to cool you down,
dressed you, the garments strict and awkward in my hands,
and got you into a taxi to the hospital,
the driver eyeing us from his rearview mirror--
The blue tone of the paging bell,
the green smocks, metal beds,
plastic chairs linked
in a childhood diagram of infection,
and when they wheeled you by
there was a needle in your arm,
the bruise of this
already showing itself,
and rather than watch gloved doctors handle you
in their startling white coats and loose ties,
I took a seat outside and waited,
time yawning, thick and static--
and made clear to me in the bright light of speculation
was time's obstacle in the body,
and those things I could do that might cushion it.