Notes from a Centaur's Curator
Gwen Sayers
Lift the dust cover, gently. The centaur
is old, in bits, you may lose some.

His hooves paw straw in a glass case.
They kick. Comb the feathering with care.

Ears share a drawer with jet eyes
and a warped arrow. Use a damp sponge.

He still calls from his voice box
for Scotch on the rocks. Ignore.

Braid his white tail in a chunky plait,
truss the chaos with ropes to secure.

Rub his freckled back, curry his sides,
soothe the scar on his neck with lanolin.

When you polish his knuckles, forget
your bruises. They're safe in the chest

with dead ends, nightmares and shadows
he fought. Air out these memories

and fold away. Replace his musty shroud.
Turn off the lights when you leave.

He is happiest in the dark.
from the book GHOST SOJOURN / Southword Editions 
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A fellow poet suggested I curate a cento. Because we were on video, speaking from different continents with different accents, I thought she said, “curate a centaur." This is how my poem came about. I imagined the speaker was a centaur’s curator and began describing what the job entailed. In the fourth stanza, the centaur adopted a human persona that took over the poem.
 
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“A formalist poet with a love of sonnets, limericks, and other traditional forms, Mr. Taylor was roundly praised for his techincal dexterity and attention to rhyme and meter. Former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser, a fellow Pulitzer winner, once said that Mr. Taylor had 'never published a poem that was not perfectly imagined, perfectly shaped, perfectly paced, and perfectly moving and true.'”

viaTHE WASHINGTON POST
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Mary-Alice Daniel on Object Lessons

"Science is one language articulating the esoteric fabric of spacetime. Verse is another valence. Astrophysics and poetry pair prettily. Both concern themselves with the behavior and spectacle of celestial bodies; with the margins of massive matters alongside the infinitesimal; the inconceivable infinite. Dreamers in the two disciplines speculate alternate & extra dimensions. We enlist anomaly. We trouble in stasis. We peer into—across—the reality tunnel: the entangled expanse between what you see and I perceive."
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