September 2020
Tad Richards
tad@tadrichards.com
tad@tadrichards.com
Bio Note: The Covid quarantine has given me more time to spend on poetry,
and I've been taking advantage of it, but it competes for my time with three other interests.
There's my blog, Listening to Prestige, which I've been keeping up for the past 5 years
or so, and which, when finished, will be a history of jazz in the 1950s and 60s. There's editing
the memoirs of my stepfather, the sculptor Harvey Fite, which I had put aside for a while, but
I'm now back with and determined to finish. And there's a recommitment to fiber art--making hooked
rugs, which I've come back to after a sabbatical of 40 years, and which I'm finding I love just as
much as I did back then. I turned 80 this year, which means I can look forward to another 20 years
or so of productive work.
For the Confessional Dead: An ABC Villanelle
Skunks in the evening.
A message to Lowell:
Fault line in the brain.
Lovers are coupling,
Fancies are evil:
Skunks in the evening.
No more L. L. Bean.
Sparks from an anvil.
Fault line in the brain.
The coastline is bleeding,
No hope of retrieval,
Just skunks in the evening.
Nothing to gain.
Each thought a betrayal.
Fault line in the brain.
Lowell is gone.
So Plath, and so Sexton.
It's poetry’s peril:
Skunks in the evening,
Fault lines in the brain.
Wilderness
not much here to extrapolate
a world from, except maybe these bears,
who kill like Genghis Khan,
rut like Messalina,
wrap themselves in fat and fur
like Henry VIII,
and loll in the guise of indolence
under signs that warn not to feed them.
©2020 Tad Richards
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -FF