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William Greenway -- Poetry

Chagrin Falls, Memorial Day

If there were no dead
we would create them,
we-walking-by-the-river-named-
for-failure, hands full of each
other, custard, balloons, see them 
before us stratified, water pouring over 
a blessing too late, watch steps down
slick rock, every second maybe an edge.  
Chagrin falls, yes, but does it 
rise again, like spray, like 
plasma shuddering free, and like winter 
breath into night sky, does it gell
in cold space?  Lovers add 
a germ that flies a comet's tail, 
and a yolk begins to pulse in endless dark,
iambic, like a heart of hope and fear.

A Feeling's Like a Face

A feeling’s like a face
that fades with time from the mind
and memory can’t replace

the frame of empty space
where a lover’s eyes once shined,
and a feeling’s like a face.

We remember every place
where face and feeling chimed
but memory can’t replace

the first nor final fierce embrace
when soul and body twined
for a feeling’s like a face

that other, later loves erase
what once was so defined
and memory can’t replace

what time and loneliness deface
when love and loveliness decline,
for a feeling’s like a face
that memory can’t replace.

Blind Hearing Ear Dog

I try, by pat and paw, to translate
siren shriek, smoke alarm, warning
jingle of the ice cream truck,
but all he really wants to hear
is what I get unwanted all the time:
aren’t you cute, what a sweetie,
though how would I convey such pap? 
Rub of fur, nip, lick, or nuzzle?

Just because I can’t see what he sees--
colors, the ray-shot ocean depths,
maybe even angels--
he feels superior.
But deaf as a whole range-line of fence posts,
he’ll never know what I hear:
strange words that sift down from other worlds,
bat squeak, hawk whistle, mouse rustle,
the scrape and lisp of fallen leaves,
and the sudden sounds of hidden things
like the flap and whisper of white wings.

On Buying a Watch Online for My Birthday

I’ve tried to live with the digitals,
those cyber soldiers who claim
to be advancing, goose-stepping
toward some future place,
but really standing still, mute
beefeaters at the palace gate.
I prefer hands
moving almost imperceptibly,
creeping up on whatever’s waiting.
An illusion, sure, but not so
abstract, not ciphers beamed
by satellite,
but figures on a real road
(albeit round) you get to trail
on the way to what
lies ahead, where 
the movement on your wrist,
literal or analogous,
will continue without you,
morphing or marching
moment to moment,
surviving your cells
and the ticking of your doomed heart
toward some zenith, high noon
or midnight
that tolls to tell,
your time is now.

Late Show, All Hallows

The whole problem of life is to become transparent to transcendence.             
  --Karlfield Durckheim

On almost every channel
someone is weeping,
about a mother, a sister, a wife,
a life, a cancer.

Is there no other fear on tonight
outside of ourselves?

Let’s see: murder. Gangsters. Crime
scene. Intervention. Murder.

Not even monsters, Godzillas
frozen at the bottom of the world
that thaw when something radioactive
tumbles off a ship, blows up,
slips off a sandy shore
into a black lagoon.

No mad doctor whipping up
something nasty with a teaspoon
of toxicity, a dash of lightning,
a soupçon of rotting flesh.

Okay, just more metaphors
for the human condition, I get it.

Too bad we can’t project a little better,
get whatever gnaws away at our innards
out, give it a gentle face, show it on
some screen other than the strung-up,
wrinkled bedsheet of our lives.

Or flip to The Transparency Channel
showing what might be on the other side,
or at least could have been if we’d sprung
for the higher tier, instead of
reruns of series seven of
What We’ve Settled For,
starring Fur and Fangs,
wearing the masks of our reflections.

William Greenway

Greenway's tenth collection, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection Ascending Order. Both are from the University of Akron Press Poetry Series.

His publications include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah.

He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and been named Georgia Author of the Year. Greenway is Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University. 

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