January 2016
Clark Holtzman
choltzman@runbox.com
I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and just retired from a big accounting firm where I worked for 28 years after having taught college English for many years in Auburn, Alabama, Chapel Hill, Saint Louis, Missouri, and Wilmington, North Carolina.  I quit teaching because I wanted to be able to buy a house and not move every few years.  I got the first part of that right, but as for the second part, after leaving higher education I lived in Cleveland (twice), Los Angeles, Washington, DC, London, New York City, and, in hotels in São Paulo, Brazil and Santiago, Chile.  Naturally, every one of those places, plus others, has informed my point of view and my poems, to my good fortune.

Flower-picking
(to Anne, 8-8-88)

The days outside surpassed the ones in
by miles.
                     Blue clouds nodded in a field
of white sky, an oak flew away full of grackles.
 
Breezes, gathered at the neighbors’
back yards, whispered in
the hung-out sheets, sighed among the blouses.
 
So if I promised to call you and didn’t, you can
say I lied.  I was outside listening for clues,
I was chasing down black birds & flying oaks.
                                    I was outside,
I confess, I was outside
all day in the service of one dull vase
on a common table in a colorless room.

©2016 Clark Holtzman