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Greg Oaks
Let's visit my mother's house,
hers from the divorce, a plat of land
in the shape of a bottom-wide
poem. The front yard with its
elongated driveway, its stand
of trees my father saved
to give their bedroom privacy:
this could be the first section
of a poem, the line breaks
edged, the sidewalk swept
of adverbs. The front porch lit,
the door unlocked, would be
too quick a shortcut to the end,
so let's wander around the side
and into the backyard where
the absence of moon encourages
the darkness to rise from the dirt,
the air ponderous enough to hide in.
Here, the poem offers a deepening,
something nudging from the depths,
a pet trying to wake you from a dream.
Let's observe the windows of the house,
the living room blazing, the tube-style
TV flashing. Let's listen to the yelling,
a deep, angry voice, drunk and suffering,
and a woman screaming that the man
hates his life, his family, then the sound
of things breaking. We should be thankful
for poetic concision. We can linger
in the early lines, for years maybe,
breathing slowly, listening
to the breeze in the intricate
capillary limbs of the mesquite trees,
putting off what we know will one day
need to be done: returning to light
from the consolation of earth,
going back into that house
to clean, catalogue, and forgive:
an ending that no one, not even the poet,
knows how to read.
from the journal COPPER NICKEL
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One year after I wrote this poem, my father passed away, something that the end of the poem hinted might happen and that I’m still grappling with, learning how to “read.” After my parents’ divorce, they became great friends, partly because they were two decent, kind human beings who began to recognize that about each other. My mother was there when my father took his final breath, one of the last people to hold his hand, rub his arm, tell him he could let go.
South Korean Poet Kim Hyesoon to Read at Harvard

"Kim has been invited to the T. S. Eliot Memorial Reading event at the Woodberry Poetry Room in Harvard University’s Lamont Library on Oct. 2, according to Moonji Publishing on Wednesday."

via THE KOREA HERALD
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What Sparks Poetry:
Dong Li on Evan S. Connell's Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel

"Vestigial shards of old legend and lore dart in and out of vertiginous fragments of human folly and futility, now like lightning on a clear day, now like fireflies on a talkative night. The 'I' slyly travails through historical significance and triviality until the tribulations of fear, faith, and ferocity surface in a dizzying dream state, hauling history into the prophetic present, where associative meanings are distilled into a crude and cruel illumination."
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