Marc Wiegand

Drawing 
  (for Emily)
 
I know that we are only atoms spun
upon our solitary ways, as new 
as wonder from the furnace of the sun,
that make a spring from winter’s end of time.
And with whatever spark, my lease, I hew           
from paper with my pencils dark and bright,
to register your form and face, to draw
your self on pages blank as any white,
to find the laws that legislate your line.

I did not see the eye cannot give birth,
that vision cannot own, that drawing’s not enough,
that atoms flown must race from sun to earth.
Though time’s device may make an end, erase,
remember, love, I’ve drawn you all my life. 


My Sleep Myself Asleep 
 
What does it mean to drift in sleep, my knees 
drawn tight up to my breathing chest in deep 
down fathoms of my pillow, blanket, sheets, 
dark nest where I am never what I seem?

Around an unknown corner there's a knowing dream, 
a play without beginning, without end, and I 
am always in it, unprepared, and stammering
my lines, to which no one replies. Perhaps I’ll learn 
my blundered part someday. It’s possible. I might. 
Because I know the languid structure of the dark
at play, that there is always somewhere light, a spark
that I can catch and hold until I fall awake
outside the theater where memory is parked,
the lost and found I rummage in to make a start.
 
 

Marc Wiegand attended the University of Texas at Austin (B.A., M.P.A.), the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, the University of Houston (J.D.), and was awarded a visual artist’s Residency at the The Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy. His poetry has been selected for publication by a number of journals, including WestWard Quarterly and Innisfree Poetry Journal. He is an international lawyer and exhibiting visual artist who lives and works in the Texas Hill Country.