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issue 1
 
 

Bill Wolak

 

 

 

DEEP INTO THE ERASURES OF NIGHT

Other hands will touch this warmth
where nothing is deeper than willing flesh.

Your kiss, open as water, dissolves into mine
and somehow secret maps
are exchanged in our nakedness.

Now loving makes a ladder
out of flesh and its scars,
and we climb deep into the erasures of night.

Other hands will touch this warmth
when before surrendering to sleep
a caress still stalks beyond exhaustion
the enticing pinks in which rain
sleeps after lovemaking.


 

 

 

CHARTING THE NYMPHOLEPTIC CONSTELLATIONS

Because you urge a keyhole
of my sperm
to follow you deeper
than fire smiling at wood
into the shifting densities
of an embrace,
only your flesh
can warm up this night
which is disappearing
into its own scars.

While you are sleeping,
your eyes rise out of your body
and become eggs dreaming
inside a bird as it flies.

Awake, you cut the oceans
out of all my maps
to quench my insatiable thirst
of sand that has never been wet.

Tomorrow all the darkness
that stars erase
your absence will return to me.

 
 
Bill Wolak is a poet whose work has appeared in many literary magazines and has published one collection of poetry, Pale As An Explosion. He has translated Joyce Mansour, Stuart Merrill, and Francis Vielé-Griffin. His most recent translation, Your Lover’s Beloved: Fifty-one Ghazals of Hafez with Mahmood Karimi-Hakak will be published by Cross-Cultural Communications early in 2009. Mr. Wolak has been awarded several National Endowment for the Humanities scholarships and two Fulbright-Hays scholarships to study and travel in India. Mr. Wolak has traveled throughout Asia including trips to Tibet, Nepal, Thailand, Japan, and China. In 2007, he was selected to participate in a Friendship Delegation to Iran sponsored by the Fellowship Of Reconciliation, the nation’s largest and oldest interfaith peace and justice organization. This summer he has been awarded a grant to do field work in China and Japan by the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia. He has been an adjunct professor in the English Department at William Paterson University for over twenty years. Mr. Wolak’s critical work, which specializes in writing about international as well as American writers, has appeared in Notre Dame Review, Southern Humanities Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Persian Heritage Magazine.