Michael Gessner Verse-Virtual 2018 September

September 2018

I live in Tucson with my wife Jane, a watercolorist. Our son Chris writes for screen in L.A. My more recent work has appeared in Juniper, New Oxford Review, (forthcoming this fall,) North American Review, Verse Daily, Innisfree, and others. My most recent collections are Transversales (BlazeVOX, 2013,) and Selected Poems (FutureCycle, 2016). I enjoy writing articles and reviews and these may be found in Jacket2, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, NAR, and The Kenyon Review, C. V. Mosby, Times-Mirror, and Allyn & Bacon Composition Series.

A QUESTION FOR PHILIP LARKIN

What was the subject of your longings,
was it love with its sad belongings?

Was it the spongy girls, the lovers in the park
who rolled down the hill and into the dark?

how we are all invalids from the start
and nothing holds, and all falls apart,

and when our time has come and we have done,
who shall we be, what will we become—not anyone?

LIMINAL

There is something terribly right with me,
It is called Imagined Reality.

At times I live so wonderfully well with it
I seem to leave the earth a bit.

There is something terribly wrong with me,
It must be called Biology.

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