{"id":685,"date":"2007-04-17T19:17:05","date_gmt":"2007-04-17T23:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2007\/04\/17\/carl-dennis-border\/"},"modified":"2010-07-16T19:22:40","modified_gmt":"2010-07-16T23:22:40","slug":"carl-dennis-border","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2007\/04\/17\/carl-dennis-border\/","title":{"rendered":"Carl Dennis, &#8220;At the Border&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>At the border between the past and the future<br \/>\nNo sign on a post warns you that your passport<br \/>\nWon&#8217;t let you return to your native land<br \/>\nAs a citizen, just as a tourist<br \/>\nWho won&#8217;t be allowed to fraternize with the locals.<\/p>\n<p>No guard steps out of a booth to explain<br \/>\nYou can&#8217;t bring gifts back, however modest,<br \/>\nCan&#8217;t even pass a note to a few friends<\/p>\n<p>That suggests what worries of theirs are misguided,<br \/>\nWhat expectations too ambitious.<\/p>\n<p>Are you sure you&#8217;re ready to leave,<br \/>\nTo cross the bridge that begins<br \/>\nUnder a clear sky and ends in fog?<br \/>\nBut look, you&#8217;ve started across already<br \/>\nAnd it&#8217;s one-lane wide, with no room for U-turns.<\/p>\n<p>No time even to pause as drivers behind you<br \/>\nLean on their horns, those who&#8217;ve convinced themselves<br \/>\nTheir home awaits them on the other side.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/partner\/29017\/biblio\/0143038753\"><i>Unknown Friends<\/i><\/a>. Carl Dennis will be reading with Henri Cole tonight at Housing Works Caf&#233; in an event sponsored by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poets.org\">Academy of American Poets<\/a>. As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smartishpace.com\/home\/poetsqa\/dennis_answers.htm\">he explained to a reader<\/a> during an online Q&#038;A, &#8220;Poetry is useful in that it allows readers to feel that they are not alone, that others have thought and felt as they have. It can do this more powerfully than any other kind of writing, or at least more directly, because in a good poem we are made to feel that we are in the presence of a whole human being speaking to us directly, or providing a script for us to enter as we see fit.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the border between the past and the future No sign on a post warns you that your passport Won&#8217;t let you return to your native land As a citizen, just as a tourist Who won&#8217;t be allowed to fraternize with the locals. No guard steps out of a booth to explain You can&#8217;t bring [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}