MEADOW
Moments that were tender, if I can use that word, now rendered in memory’s worn face, have names attached and, less vivid, places that are more frequented than present places. Four decades is not so long ago, when facing an open window, hands braced against the sill, (moonlight on her back) and, outside, grass in furrows, or so it seems to me who’s never left for long that window or looked much beyond the meadow and yet have continually wondered what she was looking at, having never, as far as I can see, looked back.
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MICHAEL COLLIER’s most recent collection of poems is An Individual History (W.W. Norton, 2012). The Ledge (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A new collection, My Bishop and Other Poems is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. He co-edited, with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, A William Maxwell Portrait, and has published a translation of Euripides’s Medea as well as a collection of essays, Make Us Wave Back. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.
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Read more by Michael Collier:
Poem in Plume
Sixteen Poems collected at Innesfree Poetry Journal
Poem in B O D Y