Mastery

BY Joseph Hutchison
Then shall the lame man leap as a hart,
and the tongue of the dumb shall be free.
— Isaiah 35:6

Across the steep field, amid grasses
twitching like blown tatters of bandage,

I saw Paul Celan dalag — hazarding a dance,

albeit weighted down by an ashen overcoat
so that his dance seemed a sort of stagger,

anguished, euphoric, exacting, adroit — as if

this halting mastery might distract or scare off
the hound of oblivion snapping at his heels.

 

Biography

JOSEPH HUTCHISON‘s work includes The Rain at Midnight (Sherman Asher Publishing, April 2000), Bed of Coals (selected by Wanda Coleman as the winner of the 1994 Colorado Poetry Award and published by the University of Colorado Press, 1995); House of Mirrors (James Andrews & Company, Publishers, 1992); and The Undersides of Leaves (Wayland Press, 1985). Both The Rain at Midnight and Bed of Coals were finalists for the Colorado Book Award in their respective years. He has also published eight chapbooks, including the Colorado Governor’s Award volume, Shadow-Light, selected by Richard Shelton. His poems and short fiction have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Hudson Review, Mississippi Review, The Nation, Ohio Review, Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and in several anthologies.

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