on the last day

On the last day of national poetry month you're hearing from me. There are poets I wanted to introduce to you, poems I wanted to send out into the ether so that you too might taste their words on your tongue. They are delicious. So delicious, in fact, that I'll post them another time, in May or June or July. When spring has settled deeper into my bones. I'm fine. The funk has marinated a while and is soon to pass. Nothing to worry about. These are days when I think, and it's a good deep thinking way of being. I don't mind.

One of those poets I want to share is Stephen Dunn. He is amazing and lovely. He writes poetry that is the color of bruises.



But for now:



Thinking About Stephen Dunn

and tattered
mute angels no one has called upon in years
-Stephen Dunn, Landscape at the End of the Century

He writes about a landscape
at the end of the century
a place not barren enough for the likes of us
and yet too empty to hold an angel.
No foothold for the heavenly host.

I'm standing on grass and melancholy
influenza
recession
a post post-modern world
that is beyond the imagination of a poet

I was born in the last quarter of the last century
and if anything holds true it will be this:
I will live to see my daughter married
a girl grown older and then old
and then sometime in the middle of this
the twenty-first
I'll die

But not without begging the questions
of where I belong
of which era was mine
of why such a thing would ever seem to matter
much anyway

The angels aren't as patient.
They've moved on to another time
knowing that there will be room for them
there


(c) amy lynn romero, april 2009