Milestones
{An Umbrella Invitational}


Gary Charles Wilkens,

who has been a teacher of composition and literature, is pursuing a Ph.D. at The Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

He was the winner of the 2006 Texas Review Breakthrough Poetry Prize for his first book, The Red Light Was My Mind, and also a finalist for the 2006 Elinor Benedict Prize. His is a co-founder and an assistant editor of The Externalist, and his poems have appeared in The Texas Review, The Cortland Review, Adirondack Review and MiPOesias.


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There’s Just One Thing I Ask of You

See that my grave is forgotten.
Let them bring flowers,
but do not arrange them,
let the rains take them,
as they’ve taken all I’ve begotten.

Don’t cut the thick grass
to whom I’ve rendered my powers,
neither pluck the weeds,
for it was with the weeds
I’ve let the wide years pass.

See that my grave is forgotten.
Let them tarry a few hours,
then make them scatter
as my hopes were scattered,
as they’ve taken all I’ve begotten.



Artist’s Statement

T his poem is a milestone for me because it is my first serious poem to be written in a rhymed form, albeit a nonce form. By “serious” I mean not a class exercise or experiment, but one that I would see my name next to in publication. It is the culmination of a very slow evolution in my work towards formalism (note the lower case “f”). I still don’t write in iambic pentameter primarily, but feel that exploring formal strictures is the way forward after a period of self-perceived stagnation. For the formally curious, the form is A1bWWA2 cbWWc A1bWWA2, where “W” means the word or a form of the word is repeated. I call it an “anjanelle.”
 
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