Theory of Twilight

Gary Short

In his collection Theory of Twilight, Gary Short finds a quiet spirituality in everyday experiences, childhood memories, and natural occurrences. In poems that range in inspiration from a meditation by Basho to the stark landscapes and highways of Nevada, readers travel with Short down a highway where one encounters a schoolyard of students exercising (“scissoring into an X/ then closing to an I”) or brothers playing catch with a football (“the space between us/ filling with darkness”); where the receding glow of red taillights evokes the memory of a father smoking cigarettes in the dark, waiting for his son to come home. In the book’s title poem “Theory of Twilight,” a narrative of how a family comes together at the death of the speaker’s brother, Short’s description of the casketed body is plain-spoken and moving: “His father had touched his eyes closed, mothered / the shock of black hair from his forehead / and made into prayer, finger by finger / the hands.”

Gary Short bought his first book of poetry while teaching history and coaching basketball in Wells, Nevada in the 1970s. He has received numerous awards including the 1993-95 Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. In 1996, Short was awarded the Western States Book Award for his poems, Flying Over Sonny Liston. He now lives in Virginia City, Nevada.

A sample poem from the book

Photograph

We didn’t know, but now

we can see a balance has tipped

against him. And now that we see it,

there will never be a time

when we will not see it. His face

an ill-fitting mask

rising away from bone. As a result

his dark brown eyes become a voice,

a moment of recognition—

It’s come to this. I have

a new language. In four months

the doctors will open the book

of my body, read its last pages.

In this photograph, the clock

is a remark on the wall.

Outside, the sky falls like seconds,

the rain a consecration. My brother’s face

will blur as he turns toward the window

to look beyond the bare maple, beyond

what he knows, what I do not know.