| About me: I'm the author of three books of poetry, Plums & Ashes (Northeastern University, 1994), which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, Especially Then (David Robert Books, 2005), and Primitive Mood, which won the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press, and was published in 2009. I'm also a physician specializing in transfusion medicine, and I live, write and practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. |
| 'Cuda (Originally appeared in The Kenyon Review)
Download: Cudald224kps.mp3?attredirects=0 |
| Ode For Orville And Wilbur Wright (Originally appeared in The Southern Review) |
| Ode For Orville And Wilbur Wright I don't yearn for their steep excursion Into fame and fortune, for it had The usual price, and Orville died bitter And Wilbur died young. I envy them Only the slender and empty distance they left Between them and a seaside's grassy bluffs In mild December, the frail ingenuity Of dreams, a lifetime's hopes made of string and cloth And a little puttering motor that might have run A lawn mower if the brothers had put their minds To one first. For dumb exhilaration, nothing -- Not an F-16 thundering from its base In Turkey nor my redeye circling O'Hare -- Comes close to what they must have felt For less than a shaking, clattering minute Clearing all attachment to the world Of dickering and petty concerns: for some No other heaven. So I take note of them As they took notes from the lonely buzzard, obsessed To the point of love with the ghostly air And the small fluttering things that wandered Through it. Eccentric but never flighty, Bookish but not above nicking their hands In bicycle shops and basements, they lived With their sister and tinkered with the future. Propelled by ambition, the mandate It invents, they still heeded the laws Of nature, trimmed needless weight, saw everything Even themselves as burden, determined Not to crash and burn. Sheer will launched them, Good will, because those first forty yards Skimming shale and reeds were for everyone. Face down between the struts, staring at the ground As it blurred past, they failed like anyone To grasp the implications. But legs flailing They hung on, buoyed by never and almost And then just barely. I could do worse Than their brief rapture, their common sense Of purpose. Or I could, if only For a moment, exalt them, go along With the jury-rigged myth, the quaint Contrivance that lets them rise above it all. (originally appeared in The Southern Review) |
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