Verdad Magazine Volume 10
Spring 2011, Volume 10
Poetry by Jeff Encke
Well Diver
Water-walled I build an empire of silence
drawing with a plumb bob vertical lines
into the pool’s dark glass. Years pass.
My claws grow ragged from troweling
this synthesis of enemies. I hear rumors
of times asleep, etherized, malingering
that the flowering nerium’s roots a web
of archaeology grow as deep as water.
Then a pressure in the ears as I cross
from light and air below through meters
of icy linn a certain double-ended beat
rtass: clogged with corpses poisoning
a source. I linger in chambers of sea
as the waves crash and voices recede.
BIO: Jeff Encke's poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Bat City Review, Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, Octopus, Salt Hill, Tarpaulin Sky and others. He has taught writing and criticism at Columbia University, where he received a PhD in English in 2003, and at Richard Hugo House in Seattle.