Poem Beginning with a Line by Milosz

“When I was in Timişoara, Romania, I discovered these beautiful, tall churches made of mud and straw with exaggeratedly steep roofs. The churches, however, were so small inside they were almost of no use. I asked a peasant why they were made this way. He told me that ‘One grows slender when approaching God.’”—Mark Irwin

Speculative Friction

By Claire Bateman

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—August 2017—Poet Mark Irwin was born in Faribault, Minnesota, in 1953, and has lived throughout the United States and abroad in France and Italy. His poetry and essays have appeared widely in many literary magazines including Antaeus, The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, and the New Republic. He has taught at a number of universities and colleges including Case Western Reserve, the University of Iowa, Ohio University, the University of Denver, the University of Colorado/Boulder, the University of Nevada, and Colorado College. The author of six collections of poetry, The Halo of Desire (1987), Against the Meanwhile, Wesleyan University Press (1989), Quick, Now, Always, BOA (1996), White City, BOA (2000), Bright Hunger, BOA (2004), and Tall If, New Issues (2008), he has also translated two volumes of poetry, one from the French and one from the Romanian. Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, four Pushcart Prizes, National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio Art Council Fellowships, two Colorado Council for the Arts Fellowships, two Colorado Book Awards, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He lives in Colorado, and Los Angeles, where he currently teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern California. Mark Irwin’s new website is: www.markirwinauthor.com His new book will be out in October. Read an interview with the poet here: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2009_01_013872.php. (Biography courtesy of http://www.coloradopoetscenter.org/poets/irwin_mark/.)

“Poem Beginning with a Line by Milosz”

By Mark Irwin

“The most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.”

They are bodies of the selfless or of those newly

dead. What appears transparent is really flame

burning so brightly it appears like glass. What

you’re looking through is the act of giving: One

thing in life needed desperately, given to another,

or perhaps life itself. The most beautiful bodies

are not transparent, but sometimes the color

of lead, like the elephant whom a child with some

peanuts lifts by the trunk in his hand in the swirling

dust, so that it appears he has lifted a monument

or a city with all its pain. The bodies that seem

transparent are made of an ice so pure it appears

to be glass sweating, where you, desiring another,

glimpse your own face that weighs nothing and is burning.

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