Another Poem by Geoffrey G. O'Brien

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend August 10, 2015   Another Poem   Geoffrey G. O'Brien

I bypassed all the compromise, The first ten problems of speech And the latest, the sharpest, the contest, Then began, having already fallen, To rise just less, weaker than My chore, yours, made else By othering, by day by day, The schedules, the routes, task Whose claim I forgot to throw off, Rising less but somewhat up anyway With a kind of strength for having Done so several times before. I mean all times so far Which is the taste of coffee gone This latest one, and that it sticks Like nothing else has ever done. It isn’t a calamity so much As a disaster that it’s not one. Things already were real, are Never just. Did not just get, Can’t help being so. This Massive ordinary cloud Where I surrendered to Filling out a form in the rain That doesn’t come or does, Sent down or kept in overplus Till the next storm’s approved, The face notified of its context, The sequence continuing west West I said west, turning up To receive some all, To celebrate that share of sense Breaking into day then run After it as through gray games I plan to win by losing only Every time but one, the next To last or after that, though What it’s called when it comes I don’t, I do, pretend to know.            Copyright © 2015 by Geoffrey G. O'Brien. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “‘Another Poem’ is what it says, another instance of effort in a loop or line of trying. It maps compositional ordinariness onto other more ‘trying’ routines—waking for work, fueling with coffee, filling out forms and filling forms out, enduring weather—the ‘gray games’ within which something else can happen: poetry, love, struggle. The poem is neither particularly pessimistic nor optimistic, but as documentary as its descriptive title; maybe it does permit itself to try to hear, in the word ‘west,’ a version of Molly Bloom’s ‘yes’ that ends Ulysses, that epic of movement through the quotidian.” —Geoffrey G. O’Brien   Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013). He teaches English at the University of California, Berkeley and San Quentin State Prison and lives in Berkeley, California. Poetry by O'Brien   People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013) "Time Study" by Marvin Bell "Leo Said" by Eileen Myles "Poetry is" by Emilio Villa Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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