Half an Hour

By Jean Valentine b. 1934 Jean Valentine

Hurt, hurtful, snake-charmed,

struck white together half an hour we tear

through the half-dark after

some sweet core,

under, over gravity,

some white shore ...

spin, hidden one, spin,

trusted to me! laugh sore tooth

sucked warm, sweet; sweet wine

running cool through new

dry shrewd turnings of my soul,

opening veins.

Gull-feathers beating,

beating! Gliding. Still,

sidelong eye ... wings beating

like words against my eyes.

And your eyes—

o brother-animal, mild,

terrible!—your eyes wait, have been waiting,

knowing,

unknowable, on that sky shore.

A life is waiting.

Its webbed hand

reached out ...

Trust me!

truth-

telling fish of the sky!

your hand beyond my hand,

your phosphorous trail

broken, lost.

Source: Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 (Wesleyan University Press, 2004)

Biography

A longtime resident of New York City, Jean Valentine was named the State Poet of New York in 2008. Her first book of poems, Dream Barker and Other Poems, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1965. Subsequent collections of poems include The River at Wolf (1992), Little Boat (2007), and Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, which won the National Book Award in 2004.

Her lyric poems delve into dream . . .

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