Dean Rader

MEDITATION ON ABSOLUTION

Cy Twombly, Note I (from Three Notes from Salalah) (2005-2007)

My heart:
green

as a lake
but not

as smooth.
White noose,

after white
noose—

will I swing
or will I

sing the
words of

my note
to the

depths?
What will

I not
say? To

whom will
I not kneel?

DEAN RADER is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Harvard, Princeton, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His eleven books include Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize; Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book of the Year; and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Recent work appears in BOMB, Harvard Review, Narrative, New England Review, The Southern Review, and Zyzzyva. Beyond the Borderless, a series of poems alongside the Twombly images they engage, is forthcoming in 2023 from Copper Canyon.