Sundial by Larry Sawyer

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend December 4, 2014   Sundial   Larry Sawyer

for James Wright    The poet will seek to clothe herself in sparrows.   A motor in each leaf distills autumn’s engines and we’re off.   Upstart cartoon morning;      these various roosters scratch inside the eyelids      and declare beneath the streetlamps that their      moats are filled with vowels.   That the life alone is not wasted but rich with a pageantry of else. Who absconds with our best sense and seizes us by the throat as we untangle ourselves from lovers and, draped in fever, split the night into halves?                     Each contains a commercial advertising just that.                           Despite his tactics, fully rejecting experience the candid creator winces at the audience’s heightened passing.         Remain, in secret,   a pea of concern, in some harbor of ghostly direction.         There lurks an I among those hours.            Copyright © 2014 by Larry Sawyer. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Being a poet who also was born in Ohio, I was once compelled to visit Martins Ferry where James Wright was born and there I saw a sundial in a yard, while I stood on a hillside looking out over the misty expanse of the town below. Wright’s poem ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ has always been a poem I admire, especially its abrupt ending. The final line of my poem makes reference to the pronoun ‘I,’ which might be compared to a sundial’s gnomon casting its shadow across American poetry.” —Larry Sawyer   Larry Sawyer is the author of Breaking Lorca (White Hole Press, 2014). He is the codirector of the Chicago School of Poetics and lives in Chicago. Most Recent Book by Sawyer   Breaking Lorca (White Hole Press, 2014) "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" by James Wright "Language" by W. S. Merwin "In Portraits in Seasons" by Danielle Pafunda Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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