In the Company of Giants

I just received my copies of a new anthology, Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic Depression, edited by Thom Schramm and published by Eastern Washington University Press, which features my poem "The animal night sweats of the spirit burn." I am thrilled to have a new publication, and deeply honored to appear in a anthology that also contains poems by such greats as William Matthews, Anthony Hecht, Jane Kenyon, and C.K. Williams, to name just a few. Here's the poem:

“The animal night sweats of the spirits burn”
(Robert Lowell)

Adrift among damp sheets you turn
and turn the pillow over seeking
the cool side that isn't there. You turn
your face to the window. Rain smears
the glass and beads the streetlamp's light.
Tires hiss along the pavement.
You turn away.
Driftnets of feeling
wash over you in the dark
and finally carry you down to sleep, to dream
in fragments half-remembered when
the sun pours in across your face.
Arising
you awake to the perpetual
daily crucifixion: pinned by desire
to desire, you wriggle like an insect.

Buy the book here.

New Year, New Post

Belated Happy New Year! I've been busy first with holidays, then a trip home to Texas (from which the above photo of the Trinity River came), and then getting fully re-engaged with work.

I did manage finally to revise a recent poem after the usual careful reading and excellent comments from Naomi:

See in the Dark

“When what you write about is what you see,
what do you write about when it’s dark?”
—Charles Wright

Faces of lost loves
and my sons when
they were small,
heat shimmer off
a Texas highway
when I was a boy,
the woman gesturing
to no one on the bus
this morning.
Even with the light off
it’s never completely dark:
I can see the pale green
numbers on a digital clock
and streetlight filtered
by the blinds and
ambient light from
who knows where.

I hope 2008 is happy and productive for everyone!