April 6, 2007 ·
To mark National Poetry Month, NPR.org is featuring a series of newly published works selected by the Academy of American Poets.
The poet August Kleinzahler says Equi's poems "have a mystery to them that their offhandedness and surface whimsy belie. Reading her, you may find the world becomes a more unstable, various, and gently freaky place."
-------------------------------
"Bent Orbit" Elaine Equis
I wind my way across a black donut hole
and space that clunks.
Once I saw on a stage,
as if at the bottom of a mineshaft,
the precise footwork
of some mechanical ballet. It was like looking into the brain
of a cuckoo clock and it carried
some part of me away forever.
No one knows when they first see a thing
,how long its after image will last.
Proust could stare at the symptom of a face
for years, while Frank O'Hara, like anyone with a
job,
was always looking at his watch.
My favorite way of remembering is to forget.
Please start the record of the sea over again.
Call up a shadow below the pendulum of a gull's
wing.
In a city of eight million sundials, nobody has any
idea
how long a minute really is.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I really like the line about Frank O'Hara. O'Hara, who was an assistant curator at the Met, would often jot down his poems whenever he felt inspired on whatever scraps of paper were available. His editors were often forced to pick through stacks of napkins and hotel stationary in search of the poet's more inspired works.
Post a Comment