Assistant Editor Lily Meyer: In “Coming To” and “Assateague,” Robert Wood Lynn balances the natural with the manmade, and loneliness with connection—though, granted, his speakers find more companionship in nature than among other humans. His language is precise, evocative, and unfussy, imbued with, as he puts it in “Coming To,” the “[s]trange ache” of solitude.
Each poem below is accompanied by audio of Lynn reading the piece:
Assateague
Dropped you off at the airport
for the last again, this time not waiting
around to watch the planes shrug off
this earth. Didn’t even pick one to wave at,
pretend was yours. Abandoned
to my own obsessions, I drove six hours
alone to the island of the wildest ponies
and ignored them. Snow geese, I wanted.
Thick enough to blot the sun. I was younger
then, still under the impression
I could get a year’s exercise in a weekend—
that a moment, held right, held always.
So I walked the beach fourteen hours hoping
to make Maryland and failed. No roads
arrived to take me back. I lay in the sand,
waited for my knees to return. The way you wouldn’t
but birds always do. I learned these weren’t
the wildest ponies—just the most famous
for being wild. Chubby with salt water, they stood
at a distance disappointing the marsh grass
and the few visitors gathered in the cold.
I had never seen a snow goose before
the day I saw ten thousand. Their collective static
on the inlet, lifting and landing and
lifting again. Seen one since? I imagine
you asking. No. I mean, maybe once or twice
in passing, though why would it matter?
Coming To
in this stutter of light, that static of neurons whimpering like dogs
on the Fourth. A voice—though I didn’t, even couldn’t, know
what a voice was. Or attach it to a body, a person, a patience holding
my head up out of this mud. These banks, some lake. The never
of going back. Water moving faster without getting closer. Strange ache,
a sunshower. I was surprised everything had a character: either more
fear or less. Bridges connecting to clouds. Religious. The mouse I named
so someone would stop asking me to kill it. Someone else’s car askew.
The first full thought I wrangled into form was I better tell her
I’m okay. This thought—how I discovered that I was.
Robert Wood Lynn is a poet from Virginia. His debut collection Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press, 2022) was selected by Rae Armantrout for the 2021 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. His work has been featured in The Adroit Journal, Blackbird, New Ohio Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and other publications.
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