Robert Wrigley, “Review”

Impossible not to admire the stinkbug’s blundering:
sitting on the porch, I could see among the swarm flying my way
this particular one at least twenty yards or more away
before—and despite my hapless ducks and feints—
he smacked me right in the forehead and fell
exactly into the center of the book my evasive maneuvering
had caused me to forget about, so that it closed on him

and wounded him, yes, it’s true, but not before
he left in the thin of it that amazing harsh camphor
and swampy crotchland smell he is most famously known for,
which even today, some years later, still purls
from its pages, though I have not opened the book again.

From Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems. “My sense of the poem has come to be that it is a thing that emerges in the writing. It is rarely something premeditated, plotted, graphed, or outlined in advance,” Wrigley once told an interviewer. “Good poems are smart. They devise ways of allowing the reader in. They don’t answer all the questions; they pose questions. But the ones that matter most to me are the ones that allow me to come inside and see how the light shines through the windows.”

9 April 2007 | poetry |