Afterwards by Philip Schultz

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend October 8, 2014   Afterwards   Philip Schultz

Suddenly everything feels afterwards, stoic and inevitable,  my eyes ringed with the grease of rumor and complicity, my hands eager to hold any agreeable infatuation that might otherwise slip away. Suddenly it’s evening and the lights up and down the street appear hopeful, even magnanimous, swollen as they are with ancient grievances and souring schemes. The sky, however, appears unwelcoming, and aloof, eager to surrender its indifference to our suffering. Speaking of suffering, the houses—our sober, recalcitrant houses— are swollen with dreams that have grown opaque with age, hoarding as they do truths untranslatable into auspicious beliefs. Meanwhile, our loneliness, upon which so many laws are based, continues to consume everything. Suddenly, regardless of what the gods say, the present remains uninhabitable, the past unforgiving of the harm it’s seen, while the future remains translucent and unambiguous in its desire to elude us.            Copyright © 2014 by Philip Schultz. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “This poem came out of feeling overwhelmed by reading about the endless stream of world tragedies recently. Poetry is often the only place to take this building sense of experiencing the same hopeless dream, in which the future and the past appear to conspire to completely debilitate the present of any forward motion. It doesn’t change the news but I feel a little better.” —Philip Schultz   Philip Schultz is the author of The Wherewithal (W. W. Norton, 2014) and received the Pulitzer Prize for Failure (Harcourt, 2007). He is the founder and director of The Writers Studio and lives in East Hampton, New York. Most Recent Book by Schultz   The Wherewithal (W. W. Norton, 2014) "Spent" by Mark Doty "One Day" by Joseph Millar "Traveling Light" by Linda Pastan Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038