The lash-thin clouds dwindling above
a line of trees no longer shaved
by winter’s blade, but leafed in full
spring array, remind me how many
spoken sentences trail into silence,
hoping quiet can finish saying
what words did not.
The ellipsis at the end
of the sentence spins outward
to the infinite, like dashes
Emily Dickinson used to close
her lines, little echoes
of the unsayable that all poems try
to say.
The first time I went fishing
was like that, the unsure sidearm
of my cast unraveling above
the solemn listening of water.
We were casting, as far as I knew,
for flashes of light, lightning drops
in the water
and we pulled back
bare hooks that said all
I would ever know about fish
and water.
We know how
sentences should behave, bending
to points as fine and inevitable
as blades or fish hooks, their danger
hovering just where steel stops.
Philosophers believe the eighty-pound
test line of their syllables will
reel in whatever whale
of Big Thought they conceive,
one reason they stack words on top
of words, believing there is language
perfectly matched to each thought.
But for most of us, language will always
be the brother-in-law who got drunk
and fell in the water the only time
the two of you went fishing,
the one
who borrows tools he doesn’t return,
whose wallet is always at home
when it’s time to pay for dinner.
Small wonder some prefer
to translate the long trails
silence makes, like contrails
a jet draws against the empty
paper of sky,
a rain drop rolling
down a gray panel of window glass,
spending itself as it moves.
And rain returns us to the beginning,
to clouds, puffy breath-shaped poets
who float without breath or anchor,
a grammar so endless and difficult
we have only shapes, wordless stretches
to map the place
all sentences move toward.
is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry: The Next Place (Iris Press, 2017); Film History (WordTech Communications, 2016 and 2005); Music From Small Towns (winner of the Jacar Press Award for 2014); Inventing Constellations (Cherry Grove Editions, 2012); Ghost Alphabet (winner of the 2007 White Pine Poetry Prize); The Light in Our Houses (Pleiades Press, 2000), which won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize; and Taking Up Our Daily Tools (St. Andrews Press, 1997).
He also has four chapbooks published, most recently Between States (Main Street Rag Press, 2010) and Greatest Hits 1987–2010 (Pudding House Publications, 2010). And
his poetry appears in numerous journals and magazines, including Poetry, The New England Review, The Georgia Review, The Antioch Review, Shenandoah, Tar River Poetry, and Quarterly West, among others.
Maginnes teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has received a Writer’s Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council.