 William Pitt Root - USA How odd, how interesting, what a blessing that skin behaves as skin does touching other skin, that lips skimming fingertips draw lips to themselves, as a droplet on a green leaf touching another gathers up substance and courage to merge yet again, the lens it forms enlarging what it rolls across for special scrutiny, each vein and pore just for that instant a pure revelation, the uniqueness fleeting yet impressed perhaps forever like a certain kiss, like the scent-print pit-vipers mark in ill-lit, labyrinthine brains as a clue of spark once they’ve struck living flesh, taking into the mucous lining of expanding jaws the single molecular particle of spoor required to guide a serpent’s tongue after its stricken quarry-- the ruby-eyed sweating toad, the panting rabbit-- until it drops. Love, if it runs true to form, similarly draws what is unique into gentle jaws softened by such elastic lips and irresistible hisses that the ones struck recoil, inevitably, in wonder at its subtle power to disarm so utterly-- predigesting all objections like bone chips or bits of skin, so that the two are one, Ourobouros, before the spell is done. |
| William Pitt Root’s first
book, The Storm and Other Poems,
will be reissued in Carnegie Mellon’s Contemporary Classics
series
spring 2005. A chapbook from Carolina Wren Press will follow
later in the
year. The Spring 2005 issue of Turnrow
is featuring Root's work. Other work is currently available at Ploughshares, Best of Ashville Poetry
Review 1994-2004, Mt. Olive
Review, thedrunkenboat.com, and the
forthcoming anthology Howling For the
Wolves. Root recently retired from Hunter College in
Manhattan. He and his wife, poet Pamela Uschuk, live outside of Durango
near the San Juan mountains, frequently traveling to give readings and
workshops. In summer 2006 they will team-teach a workshop for Prague
Summer Programs. He's been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
(three times), the National Book Award, the PEN West Book Award; he's
won the Pushcart Prize three times and all manner of important grants
and was Poet Laureate for Tucson Arizona. More of W.P.Root |