August 2015
My early education, at the hands of Dominicans, informed me of all things possible and impossible right out of a few pages of Plato's Phaedo, set down over four-hundred years before their savior walked the earth. As far as I may wander, I am pulled back to those few tenets: the transitory nature of human existence, the necessity of denial, the tensions of extremes, the hope of the sublime. I live in Tucson with my wife Jane Catherine, a watercolorist, and with our dog, Irish. My more recent work has appeared in The North American Review, The French Literary Review, and others.
Poem
The poet in a lawn chair by the side of the sea
had been reading another poet, perhaps Neruda,
and since it was summer and languid, and he had been
reading a long time, he fell to sleep.
When he woke, he called out to his wife, to tell her
his dream, and when she did not answer, and no
one was about, and the house was empty and there was
only the sea, he took his pen and wrote:
The poem is always its own. It is true and it cannot die.
At our own death, from the chest, the treasury
of the poem, a baby white dove, invisible,
flies out to find its flock in eternity.
This poem originally appeared in Ann Arbor Review, and later in Transversales, (BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, NY 2013.)
The poet in a lawn chair by the side of the sea
had been reading another poet, perhaps Neruda,
and since it was summer and languid, and he had been
reading a long time, he fell to sleep.
When he woke, he called out to his wife, to tell her
his dream, and when she did not answer, and no
one was about, and the house was empty and there was
only the sea, he took his pen and wrote:
The poem is always its own. It is true and it cannot die.
At our own death, from the chest, the treasury
of the poem, a baby white dove, invisible,
flies out to find its flock in eternity.
This poem originally appeared in Ann Arbor Review, and later in Transversales, (BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, NY 2013.)
©2015 Michael Gessner