Paul Zimmer, “Zimmer Envying Elephants”
I have a wide, friendly face
Like theirs, yet I can’t hang
My nose like a fractured arm
Nor flap my dishpan ears.
I can’t curl my canine teeth,
Swing my tail like a filthy tassel,
Nor make thunder without lightning.But I’d like to thud amply around
For a hundred years or more,Stuffing an occasional tree top
Into my mouth, screwing hugely for
Hours at a time, gaining weight,
And slowly growing a few hairs.Once in a while I’d charge a power pole
Or smash a wall down just to keep
Everybody loose and at a distance.
From Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems. Zimmer, the former director of the University of Georgia Press and then the University of Iowa Press, has published a dozen volumes of poetry and a collection of essays, After the Fire, about his life in the publishing industry. This is a sequel of sorts to the 1996 collection Crossing to Sunlight, even referencing that book’s cover art.
11 July 2007 | poetry |
Kathleen Jamie, “The Blue Boat”
How late the daylight edges
toward the northern night
as though journeying
in a blue boat, gilded in mussel shellwith, slung from its mast, a lantern
like our old idea of the soul
From Waterlight: Selected Poems. You can hear Jamie read from several of her poems at The Poetry Archive. The first third of Waterlight contains poems from The Tree House, a collection which won the 2004 Guardian Forward Prize for Poetry.
9 July 2007 | poetry |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
