|
Post by GryphonMage on Jul 22, 2003 15:15:45 GMT -5
I'm part of the Knopf Poetry list. Today I received in my inbox a poem by Mary Jo Salter. It's really pretty. I've read some of her stuff before, she's a great poet. Anyway, just thought I'd share the poem.
Midsummer, Georgia Avenue
Happiness: a high, wide porch, white columns crowned by the crepe-paper party hats of hibiscus; a rocking chair; iced tea; a book; an afternoon in late July to read it, or read the middle of it, having leisure to mark the place and enter it tomorrow just as you left it (knock-knock of woodpecker keeping yesterday's time, cicada's buzz, the turning of another page, and somewhere a question raised and dropped, the pendulum- swing of a wind-chime). Back and forth, the rocker and the reading eye, and isn't half
your jittery, odd joy the looking out now and again across the road to where, under the lush allées of long-lived trees conferring shade and breeze on those who feel none of it, a hundred stories stand confined, each to their single page of stone? Not far, the distance between you and them: a breath, a heartbeat dropped, a word in your two-faced book that invites you to its party only to sadden you when it's over. And so you stay on your teetering perch, you move and go nowhere, gazing past the heat-struck street that's split
down the middle--not to put too fine a point on it--by a double yellow line.
This is from her new book - Open Shutters.
|
|