A Secret Matter of Grave Importance

By Dara Wier Dara Wier

Except when once we drew identical lots

nothing’s ever come between us.

We keep our drifts of space

spare and daily shake our down.

You’ve glanced beyond your dirty cuffs

and caught me hand-washing my clean shirts.

Stuck with sharp wind, both

bloods are rare and rarely do

we taste the walnut’s knot of oil.

We wake between our fitted sheets

and shake our fists or pretend real fright

but not in this do we dare touch.

My rib cage can stand in yours, yours

become the swinging doors through which

magician’s swords will slice and miss

that knotted muscle. It is a trick.

We’ll make an endless show of the outright

clanking, irregular beating of our acrobatic hearts.

We’ve designed the double bars of depth;

our hearts skip — the tumbleset we think

is absence, the somersault we call forbearance

— the hearts are there, doing turns that teach

us to count and keep each finger

close to its own sly pulse.

Reprinted from All You Have in Common: “A Secret Matter of Grave Importance” by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press Copyright © 1988 by Dara Wier.

Source: All You Have in Common (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1984)

Biography

Dara Wier is the author of nine collections of poetry. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The Harvard Review describes Wier's poems this way, "many of Weir's.stanzas draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence." Her most recent book is Reverse Rapture (2005), published by Verse Press.

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