Poetry: Jeff Weddle

Poetry 


Jeff Weddle 

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Love in Vain
​
I wish I didn’t know you were dead.
These things escape notice
when we are lucky.
Better to remember an awkward embrace,
or a dark motel room in Georgia,
whispered promises,
an inexpensive lunch
of fish and pickles,
a certain October day,
the two of us beer drunk, laughing,
or your face, briefly serious,
a cigarette held carelessly
between two fingers.
I wish I could knock on some door
and you would answer
and be glad to see me,
that I could walk through that door
and say you are beautiful,
to follow like your shadow
to where you are.

Worth a Thousand Words

The oldest surviving photograph
of a woman
is in a box in an attic.
It has been seen only twice,
once by its photographer,
who developed it,
put it in a box
and, soon after, died.
The box was stored in an attic
by the photographer’s jealous wife,
who was the only other person to see it.
The wife was not the woman
in the photograph.
Though the woman
in the photograph
was not beautiful,
it is quite a beautiful
photograph.
Such was the genius
of the photographer.
That house will burn tonight,
taking everything.
The woman’s bones
are in the ground,
as are the photographer’s bones
and those of his jealous,
and quite beautiful, wife,
but the model’s face,
though forgotten in an attic,
is still with us
until the house
is consumed by fire.
When it is gone,
no one will know or care.
The fire will be remembered
for silly reasons.

No one will ever know
what was lost.

​Bio:
Jeff Weddle is a poet and writer living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He won the Eudora Welty Prize for Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press, and has also received honors for his fiction and poetry. Jeff teaches in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama. 

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