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Poem by Dara Wier

Eyewear is very glad to feature, this Friday, July 4th, the American poet Dara Wier (see photo).

Wier's books include Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005), Hat On A Pond (Verse Press, 2003), Voyages In English (Carnegie-Mellon, 2000), Our Master Plan (Carnegie-Mellon, 1997), Blue For The Plough (Carnegie-Mellon, 1992), The Book Of Knowledge (Carnegie-Mellon, 1988), All You Have In Common (Carnegie-Mellon, 1984), The 8-Step Grapevine (Carnegie-Mellon, 1980), and Blood, Hook & Eye (University of Texas, 1977).

Her limited editions include Fly On The Wall (Oat City Press, 1996) and The Lost Epic (co-written with James Tate, Waiting for Godot Books, 1999).

Her work has been featured in Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Conduit, Fence, Verse, Green Mountain Review, New American Writing, Volt, and Denver Quarterly.

Wier directs the MFA program for poets and writers for the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and, with Noy Holland and Lisa Olstein, co-ordinates the Juniper Initiative for literary arts and action. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.


Without You

You know that famous silence out beyond the stars

We’ve imported it here where it shies in shimmers

Like a dark horse’s shadow in a snow blown pasture

We pass by there, look here, what’s this my fingers

Are saying to my thumb, you know those famous silent

Skies, hear a twisted engine’s contortions discharging

Ignition ignition , how hard we register a hollow

Thump of a steel door closing, it’s not your civil twilight,

Your altitude of fine immovable patience, in another story

I lied about how wind can get a tree to tell all its secrets,

I lied about an hourglass I was supposed to fill with someone’s ashes,

In twilight anyone can be thinking about airlines,

I wondered if an hourglass filled with someone’s ashes

Might tell me something, strangely, we have hourglasses.


poem by Dara Wier
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