I’d like a Sunday
like a Mary Oliver
poem, with a few
perfect words and
lots of white space,
and paper with
a high rag content
and maybe some
righteous soy-based ink.
It would be a leaf
in one of her spare
little collections, with
a fine old lithograph
from the public domain
on the cover,
one that recalled the idyllic
Transcendentalist woods
of Thoreau and Emerson
and John Muir.
I’d like to stare
at the few
perfect words
close up with
my glasses off
and appreciate the clean
edges of the fine
big print and feel
like I’m in church,
the good part, when
the church is empty
and there’s only
silence and the sound
of my own breath.
by Will Walker
Will’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alabama Literary Review, Bark, Crack the Spine, Forge, Passager, Pennsylvania English, Rougarou, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Slow Trains, Studio One, and Westview. His chapbook, Carrying Water, was published by Pudding House Press, and his full-length collection, Wednesday After Lunch, is a Blue Light Press Book Award Winner (2008). He received a bachelor’s degree in English history and literature from Harvard University, and over the last decade, he has attended numerous writing workshops with Marie Howe, Thea Sullivan, Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky, Allen Shapiro, and Mark Doty. Will was also an editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and when not putting pen to paper, he enjoys placing bow on string and playing the cello.
