Nothing Is Saying Goodbye

by Bob Watts

The Baptist church on Razor Ridge is gone
              this Sunday morning, faux stained glass
and gravel lot, the preacher’s clapboard house,
              drowned in a rising lake of fog
that leaves the world an easy parable,
              the evidence of things unseen
but certain as the cemetery stones
              in their cloud-shrouded rows uphill.

Silent and heavy-winged, an angel floats
              on air and water bound as one,
keeping a watch above the graves
              where nothing rises from the earth but mist
even October’s failing sun
              will be enough to burn away.


BOB WATTS is an Assistant Professor in English/Creative Writing at Lehigh University. His first collection, Past Providence (David Robert Books, February 2005), won the 2004 Stanzas Prize from David Robert Books, and his poems have been published in Poetry, The Paris Review, and reDivider, among other journals. He was, with his wife, the fiction writer Stephanie Powell Watts, a founding co-editor of Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts.