Long Way Back to the End

Overview
Excerpts

by Paul B. Roth

This is poetic prose at its finest. Paul B. Roth’s sentences unfold, gradually reveal ever deeper meanings, and then crystallize into moments of communicable inner experience no less drawing on the vivid particulars of the natural world. Long Way Back to the End especially focuses on solitude, on loss, and on “waiting” so intense and resonant that one thinks of the French term, attente. “Who passes by, who doesn’t notice you, who never notices you or ever comes for you,” he writes in the first of the haunting prose poems collected in this volume, “is a much larger part of your life than you theirs.” These are pensive, sensitive, mellifluous evocations characterized by the play of sunlight (or moonlight) and darkness. Shadows flit by or envelop in settings where the narrator pits his yearning against his need to accept. The tension here is fully ours, for each of us must also ponder which orientation should win out at the end.

—John Taylor

Paul B. Roth has been published widely in the United States and his work has been translated and appeared in journals from Japan, Peru, Israel, France, Bolivia, Italy, Ecuador, India, China, Mexico, Italy, Syria, Romania, Estonia and the UK. In both 2018 and 2020, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the author of seven collections of poetry of which his most current are Cadenzas by Needlelight (Cypress Books, 2009), Words the Interrupted Speak (March Street Press, 2011), Long Way Back to the End (Rain Mountain Press, 2014), Owasco: Passage of Lake Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Weightless Earth (Bitter Oleander Press, 2022). He lives in Fayetteville, NY where he’s served as editor and publisher of The Bitter Oleander Press since 1974.

by Paul B. Roth

Low Detection

Imprisoned by thrown-open doors and windows, you wait. Who passes by, who doesn’t notice you, who never notices you or ever comes for you, is a much larger part of your life than you theirs.

Venturing out on occasion, you fear tiny rainbow prints on new fallen snow will lead you underground between two overlapping roots that were once the legs your mother at the last moment crossed before carrying you full-term to birth, and yet, you’ve never had such problems following these same rainbows in the dark where snow’s melted into one calm winter streambed after another.

Every time you return, you ask for silence and its unspoken promise of solitude. Lightbulbs tightened into place yet loosened by the human vibrations spiderwebs cushion, burst with so much light that there’s no space outside your own body in which you’ve ever been seen.

In the future, you’ll take your darkness elsewhere.

Midnight Blue

After snowy headlights blotch the hotel lobby’s ignored fica, fern and spider plant shadows and its elevator goes up before coming down, noise filled streets are muffled by slush swirling round the mushy hubs of the warm bus ride home at whose last stop you forgot to get off.

Since sight itself’s become a sort of blindness, when let off, you walk as far and as fast as you can without once looking where you’re going. So embarrassed are you for missing what you never had.

Late that night you’re discovered where an aqua tint of snow around your head sunk in a snowbank’s deep bootprint resembles the halo your long walk home had you hoping you would find.