Editor's Choice Award 2013

The Editor's Choice Award 2013 goes to Temple Cone for his poem "A Closer Absence." Temple Cone is the author of three books of poetry: That Singing, from March Street Press (2011); The Broken Meadow, which received the 2010 Old Seventy Creek Poetry Press Series Prize; and No Loneliness, which received the 2009 FutureCycle Press Poetry Book Prize. An associate professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, he lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

 

A Closer Absence

           by Temple Cone

 

There’s got to be a word

for this longing

that kneels beside you

in an empty chapel

or follows you beneath bare trees,

a word inflected

with pulse and handclasp and breath.

 

You would need a thousand tongues

just to speak it,

unless you found

you were one of the tongues

and the word

was being spoken

through you. Was you.