Matthew Wimberley
Personal Helicon
—for Sally, and after Seamus Heaney
Now, five-thousand feet above sea level
we go out after dark rain to scavenge
the mosses for new life, the small shovel
of her hand scooping the damp earth, the hinge
of the gate to the backyard like the old
music of crows who watch at a distance.
Fog rises into the pines, past the folds
of the closest ridges—one dark sentence
follows another and I stay a ways
back to watch our daughter, named for the Muse
of poetry and song, sink in the haze
to check between clover for mushrooms
and I think of the word mycorrhizal—
the two-way ladders below the surface
and find her saying “Mommy, it’s beautiful”
as she tears away dead ragweed, her face
now lit up in the strangeness of time
and stares, half-smirk, as if about to sing
some invented verse, an ode with rough rhyme—
to hear herself, to set the darkness echoing.
Matthew Wimberley reads “Personal Helicon”
Matthew Wimberley is the author of Daniel Boone’s Window (LSU, 2021) and All the Great Territories (SIU, 2020). A graduate of NYU’s MFA program, Wimberley’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in: 32 Poems, Image, swamp pink, The Threepenny Review and elsewhere. Wimberley lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains and teaches at Appalachian State University.