John Timpane: IN A DRY MONTH • Cleaver Magazine

John Timpane
IN A DRY MONTH

Time says have to, time says go to a green place, a space,
a peace beyond the outskirts of earshot and streetlight
mind of barnacle-bearded whale rears, geysers
shattered water, sounds a mile past the din of fish

silence where warmth has never been. Infinitesimal
in that crush, that loneliness, those lightless

ancient canyons, whale hums a half-hour, utter tone
that travels shelf to shelf, reef to isle to continent

and every whale, oceans apart, judders a little.
Beyond the suburbs, where Orion glistens, all

sings and oceans of night reverberate: what is in me,
what is heavy, holds its breath, dive when the deep calls.

John Timpane is the Media Editor/Writer of the Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has appeared in Sequoia, Vocabula Review, Apiary Mixtape, ONandOnScreen, Painted Bride Quarterly, Per Contra, Wild River Review, and elsewhere. Books include (with Nancy H. Packer) Writing Worth Reading (NY: St. Martin, 1994);It Could Be Verse (Berkeley: Ten Speed, 1995); (with Maureen Watts and the Poetry Center of San Francisco State University) Poetry for Dummies (NY: Hungry Minds, 2000); and (with Roland Reisley) Usonia, N.Y.: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000); and a poetry book, Burning Bush(Ontario, Canada: Judith Fitzgerald/ Cranberry Tree, 2010).