Charles Fort recently received a Yaddo Fellowship. He said his plan is to write villanelles for his manuscript-in-progress: “One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing, 220 Villanelles,” and to lengthen its sections on Bergman films, Dante’s Inferno, and his ancestors’ journey from Savannah, Ga. to Liberia on May 14, 1868, after the Civil War. He said, “At Yaddo, I shall walk under the parasol of Plath, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Baldwin, Jacob Lawrence, Virgil Thomson, Bernstein, Capote, Copeland, Porter, others.” He will also write prose poems to complete his tetralogy-in-progress: “Brother Can You Spare Me a Time Machine?” He said, “As a student at Siena Heights (College), the English Department awarded me summer scholarships three times to attend the Cranbrook Writers Conference on the grounds of Cranbrook Art Academy. … They published my earliest work in Cranbrook Magazine. In one issue they had 15 of my poems! I still have a copy of the magazine. As a young poet, it was one of the most inspiring places to meet writers and editors. My gratitude goes to Siena for presenting me such experiences as a student.” His end-of-the-year poem, “The Atlas of Eros,” is below.

The Atlas of Eros

The two-headed coin determined who won the war
after the storm of the century made landfall
blew out twin transformers in the train tunnel.
Above ground the live oaks split in two.
The newlyweds caught their second breath in wildfire
stranded two nautical miles from the border.
We collaborated and created dance and poetry.
Afro Psalms was first read, performed, and exhibited
at the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney, Nebraska
Friday, January 12, 2001. My wife, Wendy, choreographed
one poem from Afro Psalms, my sonnet redoublé
titled: Stepping Out. We walked on marbled floor.
The curator wore white gloves and placed each painting
on the easel in front of two hundred fifty guests.
Our two young daughters, Claire and Shelley,
sat in the front row like noble angels.
We performed despite my wife being diagnosed
with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma forty minutes before.
We did not cancel. It was a just and miniature world.
It was the last dance of her life.
My wife’s love letters, unread for thirty-two years,
fell out of the moving van at my feet.
I lifted her silver-forged hairbrush
music box, dancer, and pulled rope for a curtain call.
Was I seeing double, opera glasses,
pirate’s telescope, hunter’s binocular,
the rings of Saturn and the pastel-stars
that fell to the floor of the proscenium
her understudy a funhouse mirror?
We walked into the reception hall.
I wore a second-hand tuxedo and your mourning veil
after betrothal was death’s betrayal.
One in a Million played on a boom box at the reception
thirty years later on the sun porch These Arms of Mine .
Two young daughters danced under a maypole.
My surprise renewal of vows left me a widower.
Professor/Minister. Friends. Two rings exchanged.
I picked up Donald Hall at the Lincoln Airport
to visit my classes and read his poetry.
He met my wife and two daughters
our eight pound toy fox terrier named Mojo.
We drove past Crete, Nebraska
a town that was much smaller than its name.
Donald pointed to the traffic sign:
“That is the town where the woman lives
who gave Jane a bone-marrow transplant
and I wrote letters to her in gratitude.”
Hall wore thick-cuffed corduroy pants.
After his reading we toasted
glasses of Loch Du, black whiskey
cured in charred sweet oak cask.
One year later my own wife was gone.
My wife, mother of two daughters, 11 and 16,
survived nine months. We almost lost her in the spring.
The Omaha doctors tried one experimental treatment.
It did not work. In the fall we prepared our belief
in bone-marrow transplant. Brother Tom, her genetic-twin
matched in blood, ancestry, and tethered to heaven.
and her white count rose and her platelets danced.
My wife became too ill for a transplant of roses.
We prepared our home for hospice.
My wife was too weak to be driven home.
I drove our daughters home
as they wept in the back seat.
The clock stopped on September 22, 2001
at the exact hour and a photograph
blew across the floor, windows closed,
lifted by grace and the hunger of gravity.
I wished for something stronger than this life
something alive in a lamp to trick death.
My youngest daughter spoke in a low voice:
We should have found a jar for her last breath.
I lifted two objects at one time
monocle and hourglass, its spindle,
miniature time-capsule, metronome
set to the estuary of my heart
a double-time march into a killing field.
I was taught how to pull even numbers
out of the failed magician’s top hat.
He had me write the definition of love on scrap paper
and burned it for holy matrimony.
I walked conjoined-twins born with extra thumbs
to the weary traveler’s wishing well.
There were two sailors bon voyage
who awakened with double vision, thirst,
seeing two warships on the horizon
under thunder crown and double rainbow.
It was not the twenty-two tornadoes
that swept across the map from west to east.
It was the two-inch baby rattler in Oklahoma
that slid under the doorjamb I feared.
Its newborn, halved tongue, hissed into a psalm.
I learned two alphabets in second grade
slept in one room with three brothers in twin bunk beds.
I was given a Rose of the Winds by the guidance counselor
become a writer or secret agent in a double-vested suit.
I sang in the Roosevelt Junior High Boy’s choir
noted for my singing two octaves higher
than classmates who ended up playing cornet.
I found two choices for everything in the world
a single passenger holding the Atlas of Eros
sky diving out of a twin-engine plane
my professor tweed or black suit
to carry my wife’s urn into our home.
I moved back into the miniature world
two young daughters balanced on my shoulders.
I learned early and I learned well
that identical twins born with brown eyes led separate lives
and two times two, times two, equaled love asunder.
There was no twin planet. Earth’s dominion
had reached the woman seated next to me,
co-pilot, heaven, and no return flight.

— Charles Fort