Oswald LeWinter
The Spear of Longinus
Time slips its leash and moves
into the garbage dump of memory
to hunt discoveries buried deep
under the detritus of a life
hardly spent
in chewing each event to yield
its marrow.
There lie the tattered shirts
of feeling,
soiled from bloody spots of
marriages
unmassaged by remorse at being
cast away.
There the children’s bears,
stuffing
beaten out the day I left and
never came again.
Cries may be insubstantial but
dried tears
glisten like specks of crystal
here
and there, assuming the
disguise of silver
light that points the
indefatigable glance
toward some obscure and
necessary treasure.
I know the gilded spear is
hidden there
that pierced a martyr’s liver
once, a wound
no healing ever sealed. I know
from legends
how mystically, the organ’s
blood congealed,
This spear cures festering
guilt by penitence.
But like the Roman, chained by
duty to an act
that changed his life, beset by
wakefulness
so I might watch the night
crawl through
the hours like a crippled thief
who can’t escape
his crime, I never understood
my life.
I tried the spear! Uncovered
each antinomy,
risked a near century of poems.
Stripped suet
from my metaphors like a chef,
preparing steak
for gourmet tongues. Nothing
became clear.
The meat hid in a sauce too
turbid for the spear.
Oswald LeWinter is a 72-year-old American poet living in Lisbon. In
1963 he published Shakespeare in Europe while teaching at
Columbia University. He has also taught at the U. of Essen and at
Wuerzburg, Chulalongkorn U. in Thailand, Jagiellonska U. of Cracow,
Carabobo U. in Venezuela, and published in Shenandoah, Sewanee,
Contact, the noble savage, Epoch, Hudson,
Paris Review, Chelsea, the Literary Review, Prairie
Schooner, Beloit, Botteghe Oscure, Kuerbiskern
(Germany), and elsewhere. His poems have been translated into French,
Spanish, Italian and Swedish and he has been anthologized in several
countries--such as Best Poems of 1962 in the U.S.A and Best
German Poems. Mr. LeWinter has been awarded a number of prizes,
including the International Rilke Prize for poems in German and English.
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