From the Editor: Celebrating National Poetry Month in April, the Delmarva Review joins with Spy and poets from across the land to present an outstanding poem each week during April. This is the third poem, with commentary from the poet for Spy’s discerning readers.
Author’s Note: In this poem I invent a heaven detached from what we do and feel on earth. Earth, where the good stuff happens. To be trapped far from earth would be a worse fate than coronavirus quarantine. What we do with others, what we have done, have been counted on for, is what lingers on, our trace, our soulful artifact.
The View From Heaven
By David Salner
where the floors are made of a glass so clear
when I stare through them I seem to float, and it’s breathtaking
and dizzying to hover like this, as on the top floor of a skyscraper,
looking into the dark cleft between buildings, slipping into the shadows
where everything seems to be happening, where the walls pulse with music, throb
like the chambers of a child’s heart, and the streets fill with drunks and flowers,
and the nights are alive with voices that brawl with anger or whisper
hurt phrases of longing, and throaty laughter beckons the lively
through a network of tracts and hidden arteries, and there
in the depths by a flight of stone steps where I left it,
my soulful artifact, which lends meaning
to everything I can never have back
David Salner lives on the Delmarva Peninsula. His writing appears in recent issues of Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Salmagundi, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, and previously in Delmarva Review. His fourth book, The Stillness of Certain Valleys (2019, Broadstone Books), includes two poems first published in Delmarva Review. His third book is Blue Morning Light (2016, Pond Road Press). Salner has worked as an iron ore miner, steelworker, machinist, and longshoreman. He has an MFA from the University of Iowa and is working on a novel about the sandhogs who built the Holland Tunnel. His website is www.DSalner.wix.com/salner.
Delmarva Review publishes the best of poetry, creative nonfiction, and short fiction selected from thousands of submissions annually from authors in the region, across the United States, and beyond. The independent literary journal is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit supported by individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Print and digital editions are available at Amazon and other major online bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.
Wendy Ingersoll says
So many evocative lines in this poem!