Memoirous

You are a slightly graying slightly paunchy poet on a bicycle in the hours before dawn, riding the city streets under arc lights, steering around potholes, in varying weather. Sometimes coyotes run beside you until they weary or veer off. This isn’t a dream. You began out of an existential desperation to find meaning, or maybe to lose weight, or to vie for fame in the treacherous academic world: publish or perish. It’s hard to stand out. So you drop out and climb aboard an ’85 bicycle with a frame size too big for you. Everything, and I mean everything, you might possibly need for the next 30 days goes into a pair of panniers and a seal line bag. You cannot escape your depression or pedal fast enough to leave yourself behind. But once in a new town you set up shop. For ten hours a day you compose dreams—an annoying woman at the Poetry Foundation called you out, saying they were in fact poems—you cycle out dreams as if they were miles and then in the early h...

This time of year always causes me to beat my wings against the bars of my winter cage. As a kid growing up in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio I was familiar with Paul Laurence Dunbar and his poem “Sympathy.” I KNOW what the caged bird feels, alas!         When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;     When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,     And the river flows like a stream of glass;         When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,     And the faint perfume from its chalice steals —     I know what the caged bird feels! I also struggled with another kind of desperation. I couldn’t grow up fast enough and get away. Even though I was a good enough student I hated high school. If I had to hear one more fellow student talking in a voice loud enough for all to hear about a weekend party or a “kegger” I’m sure I was going to puke. I was more of an observer. I’d sit back u...

February--and this has been the second worst month of 2014 for weather, the other being last month. But today is Friday--and for that I bring you a glimmer of sunshine: February by James Schuyler, from Selected Poems A chimney, breathing a little smoke. The sun, I can't see making a bit of pink I can't quite see in the blue. The pink of five tulips at five p.m. on the day before March first. The green of the tulip stems and leaves like something I can't remember, finding a jack-in-the-pulpit a long time ago and far away. Why it was December then and the sun was on the sea by the...