Poem for Vows by Matthew Zapruder

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend August 26, 2016   Poem for Vows   Matthew Zapruder

(for E. and G.)   Hello beautiful talented dark semi-optimists of June, from far off I send my hopes Brooklyn is sunny, and the ghost of Whitman who loved everyone is there to see you say what can never be said, something like partly I promise my whole life to try to figure out what it means to stand facing you under a tree, and partly no matter how angry I get I will always remember we met before we were born, it was in a village, someone had just cast a spell, it was in the park, snow everywhere, we were slipping and laughing, at last we knew the green secret, we were sea turtles swimming a long time together without needing to breathe, we were two hungry owls silently hunting night, our terrible claws, I don’t want to sound like I know, I’m just one who worries all night about people in a lab watching a storm in a glass terrarium perform lethal ubiquity, tiny black clouds make the final ideogram above miniature lands exactly resembling ours, what is happening happens again, they cannot stop it, they take off their white coats, go outside, look up and wonder, only we who promise everything despite everything can tell them the solution, only we know.            Copyright © 2016 Matthew Zapruder. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “To my surprise and (temporary) dismay, this poem I wrote for the wedding of two friends veered off into the pervasive anxiety of climate change. I was bummed out until I discovered I was on my way to making the argument that the beautifully hopeful act of eternally pledging oneself to another is, in some elusive metonymic way, related to our collective salvation.” —Matthew Zapruder   Matthew Zapruder is the author of Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). He teaches in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College and lives in Oakland, California.   Poetry by Zapruder   Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)  "Oh, atlas" by Joshua Beckman "April" by James Schuyler "our happiness" by Eileen Myles Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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