Reading Objects 2019: Student Edition

Patrick Derilus

Graduate: English

Class of 2020

pith for a poet; pith for a poem
[ekphrastic for Pauline Uchmanowicz]

by patrick jonathan derilus

for a poet

oh, sentient subject!
life and yours, are your
most true interlocutors:
they coalesce themselves
from within the stratum
of humxn retrospection,
inception of sentience.

prospective wails follow
your bothered eyes,
dismissed vociferations meld
into unfolding contentions,
consecutions of your irresolute
anthologies transcend
humxn finitude.

your ventures don’t concede
to an inactiveness of will
your mind is, as Lorde says
unbarren—replete with new
modalities in depicting a life.

for a poem

you may leave us with
few and many words to hold,
juggle, feel, and struggle; we
take them in stride, strength
at an unmitigated, elocutionary
length, alive, unraveled long after
your sentience surfaces syntax
stanza, sentence—suffixing sign.
infinitely spacious are our humxn
minds, unraveling slumbering sentience
nebulous humxn freedoms, four-hundred-year
long humxn binds, typographical rifts sifting
through the dying, thriving, pious and undivine.