"Post-Factual Love Poem" by Paul Guest

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 30, 2017   Post-Factual Love Poem   Paul Guest

I'm thinking of the boiling sea and the dream in which all the fish were singing. I want to wake up with my heart not aching like death, but I am always falling in to terror. I'm a good person. I grieve to appropriate degrees. I mourn this season. This moment. I mourn for the polar bear drifting out of history on a wedge of melting ice. For the doughnut shop which reached an end yesterday, after decades and decades. I'm thinking of the light at dawn. Of the woman in Alabama who ordered six songbirds from a catalog because she was lonely. Or heartbroken. I'm thinking of the four that came dead in the box, mangled. Of the two that are missing. I want to tell you that they were spotted in the humid air winging above a mall. I want to tell you a story about the time leaves fell from the trees all at once. I am thinking of cataclysm. More than anything, I want to tell you this. I want to disappear in the night. I want the night to vanish from memory. I want to tell you how this happened.                  Copyright © 2017 Paul Guest. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I wanted to write a love poem about this nightmarish era. I think I was unsure if it was still possible. Or if it mattered. I was interested in the direct intimacy of the voice, in its inherent drama. And a local doughnut shop really did close after forty-seven years." —Paul Guest   Paul Guest is the author of My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (Ecco, 2008). He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville. Poetry by Guest   My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (Ecco, 2008) "Dear David" by Matthew Burgess "To a Magazine" by Mary Ruefle "Jangling" by Matthew Rohrer Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! 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