Poem of the Week | November 24, 2014
Matthew Wimberley: "Cold Light"
This week we feature a new poem by Matthew Wimberley. Wimberley is a native of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. A finalist for the 2012 Narrative 30 Below Contest and the 2013 Organic Weapon Arts David Blair Memorial Chapbook Prize, his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Greensboro Review, Narrative, Orion, The Paris-American, Poet Lore, Puerto Del Sol, Rattle, and Verse Daily. Wimberley received his MFA from NYU where he was a Starworks Fellow.
Author’s note:
For me, this poem is a pseudo-revision of two other poems of mine “In the Room of Past Light” and “Ending in Light Over Two Horses” which appeared in PANK. This poem would not have happened without having first written the others. Of course, it is mostly a few images borrowed from those two poems, and certainly the setting, the rural Appalachian town I grew up in and call home. Those images were apparent after the first draft, which I scribbled down on my last day in Brooklyn before moving back to Western North Carolina, but it took some space to allow myself to break apart the old poems and find this one. Image is the driving force, the poem begins and ends on a ridgeline, first coming to it and then leaving it behind. I like to say I don’t write poems, I listen for them, and every now and then I get lucky enough to find one on paper. This couldn’t be truer of “Cold Light”. Beginning in the field, I let the image of lightning bugs lead me back to something I read about Caravaggio washing his canvasses with crushed lightning bugs. One image opened another, certainly the tension I felt growing up in a highly religious town made the inclusion of Caravaggio not only relevant but necessary (in a dialogue with the self) and I am thinking of the particular painting “The Entombment of Christ”. Here I should also give credit to my friend and forester, Graham Ford for a wonderful essay of his he shared with me, giving me the musical line about the tractor. I can’t avoid the influence of Larry Levis on this poem, his long sequence from The Widening Spell of the Leaves gave me a kind of trail map I’m still following. Also, Sharon Olds’ book The Father allowed me to confront the loss of my own father in a new way. This poem is an elegy to him, the landscape helping to navigate a complicated relationship caused by both geographic and emotional separation.
Cold Light
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