Jul 142011
 

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I met Eliot Wilson one evening during a coffee house open poetry reading in Lafayette, Colorado. Sitting beside one another on a tattered couch, our conversations seamlessly leapt from writing to our favorite local restaurants to a lighthearted (okay, playfully sharp-tongued) running commentary of any poems that weren’t quite resonating with us that night.

Fast forward four years and I’ve come to know Eliot as a friend and vital contemporary poet who is the author of The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go, published by Cleveland State Poetry Press. He has received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, the Hill-Kohn Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Robert Winner Prize from the Poetry Society of America. He currently teaches at the University of Colorado Denver.

Eliot is a worldly thinker whose writing offers a seemingly effortless lyrical grace woven with historical, political, and cultural awareness as well as substantive introspection, evocative cynicism, unique wit, and often laugh-out-loud humor. His work is purposeful in that it shows us a distilled individuality, albeit imagegistic, sullen, comic, or all these things, conjointly. These are smart, wild, vivid pieces—enjoy!

-Martin Balgach

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Three Poems From Eliot Khalil Wilson

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Wedding Vows

…and I’d like to add that I will mind like a dog.  I will wear whatever you like.  I will go wingtip.  No more white socks.  A necktie stitched to my throat, turtlenecks in August. New York gray or black, only colors that dogs can see.   I will know of squash, vermouth, and wedges.   I will do all the grilling because I love it so.  I will drive the wagon, man the bar, weed-whack compulsively.  I will make money, the bed, never a to do.

I will build like an Egyptian, a two-mile pier complex, a five-story deck.  I will listen like a bat, attend to the birth of sounds in the back of your throat. I will remember like an Indian elephant, recall requests made of me in a previous life.  Your date of birth will be carved in the palm of my hand.  I will make good. I will do right.  I will sleep on the pegboard on the wall in the garage.

I’ll have a tongue like a sperm whale, eyes like a harp seal, biceps like a fiddler crab.  I will have gold coins, gold rings, stiff gold hair like shredded wheat.  I will be golden at receptions, gold in your pocket, Paganini in your pants. Money will climb over the house like ivy.  Excellent credit will be my white whale.  I will always. I will everyday. I will nail the seat down.  I will let you pretend I am your father.

I will be a priapic automatic teller machine, never down, never a usage fee, a stock prophet, a para-mutual seer, tractable, worshipful no matter what.  I will always want to. I won’t notice what you don’t point out.  I will entertain your friends, say how your love saved me. I will convince them.  I will talk, really talk, to them.  Deep meanings will be toothpicked and passed around.

I will need zero maintenance. I will be a utility or a railroad.  There will be no breakdowns or disconnections. I will allow you lovers, Moroccan teenagers and Turkish men.  I will adopt them. I will not cry.  I will respond to grief by earning more. My sweat will smell like drug money, like white bread baking. I will be as clean as a Mormon, wholesome like Iowa.  I will lead.  I will be a star, a rock, like Rock Hudson.

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