In Dürer, by William Greenway

Self Portrait, by Albrecht Durer (Germany). 1500.

In Dürer
 
Once,
Dürer won a prize
for his hand
which drew a perfect circle.
Now we have the ring,
horizon of fine line, and leaf, and limb,
and faces like the sun
of every morning
for a year,
a caravan of royalty going round to no place
except to the beauty
of its own grace
in going on delicate camel legs
and swaying wise men
satisfied with their slow
etching on the sky and strong
ritual of colour.
 
Slim fingers
tapered
to a point
of a pen
to a perfect line
which filled
a part of empty spaces
for himself.
 
Still the circle goes
about a white ghost
who found the bright corona
and made it light the circle
of the shadow he had been.

William Greenway
                                             
William Greenway’s newest collection Selected Poems was the winner of the 2014  FutureCycle Press Poetry Book of the Year Award.   Everywhere at Once (2008), won the Ohioana Poetry Book of the Year Award, as did his Ascending Order (2003), both from the University of Akron Press.  He has published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner, and has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors' Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and was 1994 Georgia Author of the Year.  He’s Professor Emeritus of English at Youngstown State University, but lives now in Ephrata, PA.