iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Matt Kendrick @mattkendrick.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

"Under a sky too blue / to look at, he watched a little one // eat from off the ground something he knew / should not be eaten" Wonderful essence of the philosophical in this poem from @briansimoneau.bsky.social in @havehashad.com

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Catherine Rockwood @martin65.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

"There are so many ways to fail at this, day after day so many ways I fail to see coming. It's a statue, I say, he's not real, but what echoes up the shaft of history is hunger" -- Brian Simoneau, "Mercy," at @versedaily.bsky.social www.versedaily.org/2025/mercy.s...

versedaily.org

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Happy to see my poem “Mercy” featured on @versedaily.bsky.social over the weekend! Please click through if you’d like to read about my daughter’s moment of terror in a 16th-century castle: www.versedaily.org/2025/mercy.s...

The first 8 lines of my poem “Mercy” on Verse Daily:

Today's poem is by Brian Simoneau
Mercy
—St. Mawes Castle, Cornwall

The moat beneath us gone to garden, sea rose
and Cornish heather, the old guardhouse peddling
ice cream and trinkets, we crouch through a doorframe
and notice wood and stone engraved to flatter
the king whose coffers built this little fortress
protecting the harbor and its deep-water
inland passage. A stairway curls down the wall
and a hole in the floor makes my daughter scream:

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Many, many thanks to @jpdancingbear.bsky.social for featuring my poem at Verse Daily over the weekend!

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

Anthony Robinson, “I Am the King of Infinite Space,” Failures of the Poets (Canarium Books, 2023) #sealeychallenge #thesealeychallenge

On a desk, a paperback book of poems: Failures of the Poets, Anthony Robinson.

"I AM THE KING OF INFINITE SPACE"

We were young & we were shattered.
We took our lives & we settled down.

"I like your town & your trees & your
bodies of water" the way the music
drains out across a field. No vision here.

The house we built no more
than a maintenance shack. Insect shells.
Dry road. No visions.

I don't believe I understand. God
was happening all at once & even
though we didn't believe, he made us
good in the wind, made us something big

& dead & so comes love, so comes
this anniversary. So comes again
up, empty, open on the face of the waters.

Open across the breadth of the sea.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Erika Meitner, “Invitation to Tender” from Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022) #sealeychallenge #thesealeychallenge

On a desk, with a #2 pencil, a paperback book: Useful Junk, poems, Erika Meitner, with the cover art “Masculine Still Life” by Genesis Belanger.

Invitation to Tender

My friend Danielle tells me
to use a slightly more capacious
we in my poems & I look up
capacious: ample, roomy, vast,

immense & think of the church
marquee across from Publix:
God is real & loves you since
the you is all of us & we don't

deserve this enormous Earth.
Along the beach here people
walk the wrack line, heads
bowed or plant themselves

on their knees in one spot
searching for washed-up
shark teeth in the shell hash.
Our configurations of attention

are sometimes surprising—
is it capitalism or adoration
that tells us we can inhabit
anything? There are many

ways to participate in
(egress from?) this world.
See the molten sun dropping
into the Gulf? The lightning

in the distance blinking
the clouds, trying to warn us?
There are still loggerhead
nests roped off with tri-

angulated wood stakes &
orange caution tape though
just today the Endangered
Species Act was weakened

to clear the way for mining
& drilling & development.
Every day at dawn volunteers
walk the beach to count

hatchlings, release any left
behind into the Gulf so they
don't get eaten by predators.
If there is an invitation to

tender it is written in drift
toys & sea glass—dunnage
swept in by the tide & left
right at our feet. We can all

procure. We can all excavate.
We can all strip down to our
softest parts & (satisfy the
client) make our best offer.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Matthew Henriksen, “Requiem For Now” from The Absence of Knowing (Black Ocean, 2015) #thesealeychallenge

On a desk with a #2 pencil, a paperback book with [Matthew Henriksen] [The Absence of Knowing] printed in a sans serif font on a sky-blue rectangle on a white background.

Requiem for Now

Try
I tell myself

Not to impose a narrative
When I cannot see where my wife looks in a mirror

Our first plan belonged to us
Our daughter protests for eggs
Her feet tiny heart bird claws

Our second plan belonged to marriage
Where blood circles the moon
We liked to live in the open parts of plants

I don't need to tell a story

My daughter laughs out a window's mouth
Talks like trying to count the air
Her repetition wringing worry out

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B.K. Fischer @bkfischer.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

As we go off the cliff, I’m taking some books with me, including Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy 1993. Check it out, and her roundup in Electric Literature of poetry books that build immersive worlds, apocalyptic and otherwise, with a nice mention of Ceive. electricliterature.com/9-poetry-col...

electricliterature.com

9 Poetry Collections That Build Immersive Narrative Worlds - Electric Literature

These poets build entire worlds inside their pages

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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Keith Abbott

IN LIVING SILENCE

If to be human
is a conflux
of apparitions
then the tongue slides out
of the mouth
& waves once before
disappearing around the corner

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

If you’re looking for a break from the heaviness of these weeks, please consider joining me, Christina Cook, Marcia LeBeau, & Taté Walker for the Pen Parentis Literary Salon tomorrow, Tuesday January 14, at 7pm ET. We’ll be reading a few poems and talking about our writing & parenting experiences.

Promotional graphic for the Pen Parentis Literary Salon featuring Marcia LeBeau, Taté Walker, Brian Simoneau, and Christina Cook, Tuesday, January 14, at 7pm ET.

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Amorak Huey @amorak.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Honored to have a poem featured on The Slowdown podcast today -- www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2024...

slowdownshow.org

1260: Fade Away by Amorak Huey

Today’s poem is Fade Away by Amorak Huey.

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Chen Chen @chenchenwrites.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

there are tears which happen in a day that it would take a lifetime to explain. —Mary Ruefle, from “Trollope”

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Alina Stefanescu @alinaetc.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

I remember the first time I read Nikki Giovanni’s “Allowables” — being overcome by the extraordinary thing she taught me about my own fear, its murderousness. And she did this not by standing above me, but by turning quietly and saying: see what we did?

ALLOWABLES
I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me And I smashed her
I don't think I'm allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened

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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

RIP Nikki Giovanni 💜 my favorite poem of hers, one I shared with my students every year

::A Journey

It’s a journey . . . that I propose . . . I am not the guide . . . nor technical assistant . . . I will be your fellow passenger . . .

Though the rail has been ridden . . . winter clouds cover . . . autumn’s exuberant quilt . . . we must provide our own guideposts . . .

I have heard . . . from previous visitors . . . the road washes out sometimes . . . and passengers are compelled . . . to continue groping . . . or turn back . . . I am not afraid . . .

I am not afraid . . . of rough spots . . . or lonely times... I don’t fear . . . the success of this endeavor . . . I am Ra . . . in a space . . . not to be discovered . . . but invented . . .

I promise you nothing . . . I accept your promise . . . of the same we are simply riding . . . a wave . . . that may carry . . . or crash . . .

It’s a journey . . . and I want . . . to go . . .

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Riot in Your Throat @riotinyourthroat.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

All of our books are on sale for $10!!! Snag them today, before our holiday sale ends! (Note, Another Life by Frances Klein will ship late January 2025!) riotinyourthroat.com/book-catalog/

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Y’all we have a recommendation and it is that you buy at least ONE book directly from a small press today—not bookshop, not Amazon. Help keep small presses open. @juneroadpress.bsky.social @sundresspub.bsky.social @bellepointpress.bsky.social @lightscatterpress.bsky.social @bullcitypress.com

Circle of books graphic and the text:

Buy a small press book today

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Sara Eliza Johnson, “The Abyssal Zone” & “Lazarus” from Vapor (Milkweed Editions, 2022)

The Abyssal Zone

Sometimes it's seaweed in your throat you can't cough out
or an inkeloud expanding in your skull. Sometimes it's primal

like the force of an oyster making a pearl to protect itself
after a harvester surgically implants its poison, or the heart

growing a tumor that can't be extracted without killing you,
or pressure crushing your lungs to fists deep underwater.

Sometimes, you sink so far down from the sun your tongue
bloats like an anglerfish floating in a well, lost, unable to breathe

or speak, but each day you feel it trying to say something
about the shining dead language it once knew, watch its cells

burst into blue specks of light when you open your mouth.
A tiny syllable. Then darkness again. But each time a little bluer,

a little more like the home you've forgotten, my stranger
looking back at me from the mirror, just wanting me to reach through and hold you.

Lazarus

Through the mist I see as the first mammals
once saw through their forests, dark photons
translating matter into shape:
shadowflower, shadowstone, the ripple
of bees and their shadowblood weeping
inside the trees. My first eye stares back at mine
and into my chest pours a weight, an infinite
pressure inside my heart or left lung like an extinction echoing backward
into the first cell of its animal,
my body colder in that spot.
A thumbprint blooms between my breasts where a stranger once pressed
and being so alone
I open like a grave.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Yet another reason I love @blacklawrence.bsky.social: the editors are donating $1 to the ACLU for every book sold on the Black Lawrence Press website through the end of 2024 (including my poetry collection No Small Comfort)

blacklawrencepress.com

No Small Comfort - Black Lawrence Press

Brian Simoneau reads for the Black Lawrence Press Virtual Reading Series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPi9C3C4DwU

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

My poem “Suburban Eclogue” from issue 42 of Post Road

Walk with me down the block.
Notice the rows of maples, perfectly
straight, evenly spaced from the road
and one another, precise lines
running yard to yard, remainder
of careful plans, prosperity's
spread to what once was forest, once
farm—every golden age remade
over and over, parceled out
and subdivided when footpath
turned bridleway turned turnpike turned
trolley turned traffic. History
sped up with each expanding step
but look: I have found in my house
a spot where, lying on the floor,
I can see no other house, no
poles, no wires stretching away
along the road, no road at all
but only tree, only sky, bare
limbs framed in my window the way
the first name on the deed thought his
prospect would always stay unchanged
in all the ways it changed with him.
We can utter our every wish
and scrutinize all the old maps,
but we must come to understand
there is never a going back
and too: future versions of us
will walk this very block (ruins
unearthed from layers of fallout
or avenue of steeples, steel
and glass) and they will imagine

this moment of chalk-drawn sidewalks
and mulch-bordered lawns, worthy days
to recall, a glimpse of something
a new angle might help them find.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Honored & grateful to learn the editors at Post Road have nominated my poem “Suburban Eclogue” for a Pushcart Prize: www.postroadmag.com/2024/04/22/4...

The cover of issue 42 of Post Road: cover art is “Restored to Mint” by Vincent Dion, a photo of a pale blue 1970s-ish Chevy that’s been junked—shattered windows, hood detached, front tire lying among weeds and wildflowers in the foreground.

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Airea D. Matthews @aireadee.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Poems remind us of our humanity because, sometimes, the lines break. Just like humans do. And what comfort to know you can break and still be understood.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

“I am no less grateful for / the berries than for the thorns that are // meant, I think, to help” —Carl Phillips, “All It Takes” from The Rest of Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004)

ALL IT TAKES

Any force—
generosity, sudden updraft.
Fear. Things invisible,

and the visible effects by which
we know them. Human gesture.
Betrayed, betrayed. The dampness of fog as

understandable by how, inside it, from within their
thicket of nowhere left to hide—
that leafless the winter berries, more than usual,

shine. First always
comes the ability to believe, and then the need to.
The ancient Greeks; the Romans after. How they

made of love a wild god; of fidelity— a small,
a tame one. I am no less grateful for the berries than for the thorns that are

meant, I think, to help. As if
sometimes the world really did amount to
a quiet arrangement. Cut flowers. Make

death the one whose eyes are lidless. And
—already— you are leaving. You have crossed the water.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

“I lose count // In the chaos of the body / I barely knew him anyway” —Ibe Liebenberg, “Doing CPR on Some Dude Who Looks Just Like My Father” today at @poetrydaily.bsky.social

poems.com

"Doing CPR on Some Dude Who Looks Just Like My Father" by Ibe Liebenberg

from The Threepenny Review

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

“…he wanted me to know / that he knew I was there.” —James Davis May, “Tumult and Peace” in UNUSUALLY GRAND IDEAS (LSU Press) 💙 @jamesdavismay.bsky.social

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Miriam Gershow @miriamgershow.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Here’s my story collection from the awesome Propeller Books who said they’d join Bsky bc I told them to but aren’t here yet. Real proud of this book, which is 20 yrs of my writing and my whole craggy, bleary, swoopy heart.

A photo of my book, Survival Tips: Stories, which is canary yellow with a picture of a woman expressionlessly falling. There’s a silver IPPY Award seal and a gold Pencraft award seal.

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Ryan Vine @ryanvine.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Katy Didden

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eileen chengyin chow @chowleen.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls -Anne Carson [“Short Talks” From Plainwater] #everynightapoem #ofsorts

On Hedonism
Beauty makes me hopeless. I don't care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.

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Richard Fitch @tudorcook.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

"this is fine" British Library Manuscript - royal ms 20 a ii f3r

A medieval manuscript illustration from the British Library royal ms 20 a ii f3r.
Image shows a medieval king in a green gown and wearing a crown. He is stood within a burning castle with arms in the air and a look of 'oh dear' on his face

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Dr. Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Let's insist it's not disordered to care about what we care about Gracie Leavitt

THINK: PIECES

Let's insist it's not
disordered to care
about what we care
about, the lyric
flakes of felicity
everywhere while
pronouns such
faulty valves for
that which gets
included—the power
of this grammar
a clot heavy with
everything it's stopped
from forthing.

(Livingry, Nightboat Books, 2018)

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Dr. Bitch @ritamookerjee.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

look at my pantoum

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Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

June Jordan (& moving to bluesky) mood today.

Writing poems
Maybe i just need to love myself myself and
Anyway
I’m working on it

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Amorak Huey @amorak.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Two of my poems up in the terrific new issue of @coupletpoetry.bsky.social. The whole issue is full of bangers. Honored to have my words in such company. coupletpoetry.com/amorak-huey/

Morning in Early June and It’s Already Hot and So Are You

I want to stand in this newly mown field all day
and call your name three times
however many times it takes
until you appear
to grant me three wishes
wishes I would no longer need
once you have appeared
with my name on your lips
my lips on your name
I swear this distance between us
is a kind of violence
though perhaps without distance
there would be no such thing as desire
the air here smells of overripe berries
and drying grass
the sun heats my skin
past the point of pleasure
which my darling is how I know
how I know the field of want is real

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Brennan Bestwick @yrfrenbren.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

“But they can't know / that the most amazing part of waking up / is you are not dead. You are wearing / a totally splendid bathrobe that hugs / you like a dress.” Wendy Xu #poetry

We Are Both Sure to Die

During a football game so consider / there will be other people. But they / can't come with us. But they can't know / that the most amazing part of waking up / is you are not dead. You are wearing / a totally splendid bathrobe that hugs / you like a dress. Hopefully there is some / coffee for how I am tired. Hopefully my head opens up like a rose.

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Dorsey Craft @dorseycraft.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

Recent poem from Sixth Finch to introduce/reintroduce myself. I am chronically late, but glad to be here.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

“I have tried to / imagine all the space that // is not the star” —Prentiss Moore, “Trace” from The Garden in Winter and Other Poems (University of Texas Press, 1981)

Trace

If a star were a man.
If a star is a man.
Such power. I have tried to
imagine all the space that

is not the star. A man
sees what is near him,
the beginning of his absence,
its trace in his mind.

What is a fanatic
other than one who
has tried to reclaim
all he has lost.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

Prentiss Moore, “Poem” from The Garden in Winter and Other Poems (University of Texas Press, 1981)

Poem

one sees the budding of
trees it seems always
two or three days after it
begins, like awakening
from a sound one did not
actually hear

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Michael Metivier @grousehollow.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Welcome to BlueSky fellow poets, and thank you for following. Here is a poem of mine published this fall in Orion. Looking forward to your words!

Bloodroot by Michael Metivier

I know my leaf is not so bold
as others’ are

who beg their branches
cervicorn for others’ light

though I remain content
upon the forest floor

with mesophyll in armored sleep
all summer’s night

and in the fall witness my green
desaturate

accepting winter’s thinning
without ire for

in spring my greenness unfurls
from the same deep place—

in spring my god is not the sun
but aperture.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 07/08/2024

Kasey Jueds, “Stratus clouds form” from KEEPER (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) #thesealeychallenge

Stratus clouds form

when a layer of air is cooled
to the saturation point, and today
I want to call it kindness:
like lilacs permitting us their scent
just sometimes, off to one side
of the entire, rain-shined bush,
mountains keep to themselves
behind gray, thinking we can't hold
all of this at once. In Siena
I saw a leafless tree, covered
in oranges, and St. Catherine's head
preserved behind glass in the church,
as if too much wholeness
could be too much. Then last winter I forgot
about daffodils, and felt so surprised
when they returned, yellow all the way through
like a ball of wool that, even behind
a closet door, contains the baby's blanket
wholly in its globe, and waits
for our hands to begin.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 06/08/2024

Taneum Bambrick, “Drinking in the Company Truck” from VANTAGE (American Poetry Review, 2019) #thesealeychallenge

DRINKING IN THE COMPANY TRUCK

We're six, tossing glass beer bottles
at the hole of a fire pit. Six worn-through

back pockets. The print of chew-disks. We spit
red. We smoke. Binocular women

on speed boats. Call their chests bald eagles.
Jail bait. Joke about one's daughter's age. Six

experience labor devaluation—
ex-loggers ex-construction. Six thieves

in a field of onions. Cry while skins open.
The freeway heat. Cry drinking water

bottle whiskey. Corona from an empty
Pepsi. We're six hated. Six sexist.

Six reactions to one's dying wife.
The wind chimes she cut from cans of Bud Light.

How, without one, five fight. Knuckles twisted white.
Five sweep webs off the ceiling slats

of a duck blind. We're flashlights scouring that dirt
road looking for one's lost pocket knife.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 02/08/2024

Dana Levin, “Ars Poetica (the idea)” from Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) #thesealeychallenge

The cover of the poetry collection Wedding Day by Dana Levin, which features the photo “Me and My Human” by Vincent Laforet.

Ars Poetica

would it wake the drowned out of their anviled sleep —

would it slip the sun like a coin behind their eyes—

- - - -
The idea, the teacher said, was that there was a chaos
left in matter—a little bit of not-yet in everything that was—

so the poets became interested in fragments, interruptions—
the little bit of saying lit by the unsaid—

was it a way to stay alive, a way to keep hope,
leaving things unfinished?

as if in completing a sentence there was death—

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 01/08/2024

January Gill O’Neil, “Harvest” from Glitter Road (CavanKerry Press, 2024) “I need a moment without malice, // an hour without doubt or debt / or death” #thesealeychallenge

The cover of Glitter Road: poems by January Gill O’Neil, featuring a color map of the Mississippi River Meander Belt by Harold Fisk, US Army Corps of Engineers, 1944

Harvest

September, summer's humid sigh.
I stretch my body out under
the harvest moon, arms akimbo

as I stand alone in my back yard
hidden under a canopy of oaks.
I need a moment without malice,

an hour without doubt or debt
or death. I need a moment when no one
wants or needs me, no questions,

no answers, where nothing can eclipse me
but earth's shadow, silent as an afterlife.
And I am heavy on the ground surrounded by

brown grass and leaves
as the first rough acorns of fall
begin their descent.

The sky is empty of everything
except the deepest darkness
and a rising moon. I am thankful

for this minute of pause,
before gravity pulls me in,
says, Begin again.

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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

Linda Pastan

5. Ars poetica

Escape from the poem
by bus, by streetcar—
any way you can,
dragging a suitcase
tied together with twine
in which you've stuffed
all your singular belongings.

Leave behind
a room
washed by sun
or moonlight.
There should be a chair
on which you've draped a coat
that will fit anyone.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 20/03/2024

Martín Espada, “Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn” from FLOATERS (Norton, 2021)

Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn

On a winter morning in 1968, my father left to walk the picket line.
He rode the elevator in his black coat, hood over his head in the hour
before daybreak. On the third floor, the doors opened. A white man
waiting for the elevator stood there, peered at my father in his black
coat and hood, in his brown skin, then screamed and fled. The doors closed.

My father laughed on the picket line that morning. He laughed for years.
The guy thought I was Death, he would say. Death rides an elevator
in Brooklyn, mugger Death, militant Death, Puerto Rican Death.

Listening to the story, as the screaming man screamed louder with every
telling, I never thought one day my father would be the man standing
there, waiting for the elevator doors to open. He did not stare or scream
or run. He stepped into the elevator, and the doors closed behind him.

The cover of Floaters: poems by Martín Espada (winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize) features the photo “Angel Luis Jiménez, Evicted Mushroom Worker, Kennett Square, PA, 1981” taken by the poet’s father Frank Espada.

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 18/03/2024

“Do you consider yourself a part of or apart from? // Where you are apart from, what do you cast into the distance? // A poem is a line cast into the distance.” —Claire Schwartz, from “[The original gesture]” in CIVIL SERVICE (Graywolf Press, 2022)

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Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 14/03/2024

To have wanted more, where has that carried me, if what so much matters now can be proven later to all along have been doomed not to? —Carl Phillips, “By Hard Stages” from Rock Harbor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)

All the glories—
ribbed, and
separate,

collective
sway-in-the-wind.
Shut them.

To have wanted
more, where has that
carried me,

if what
so much matters
now can be proven

later to all
along have been doomed
not to?

The governing
drift was from
sensation to

distraction to
irrelevance: "they came
to nothing," it says here,

"en route
settling for things like
heat falling mostly

against, light mainly
falling, between them
a bush or

a skull
shimmering like another
example of absence of

will—with
heat only,
shivering"

Do I make
a difference? or
What is it

so persuades, I
must make one?
The text breaks like a road

forking where none
warned of ...
Look at yourself,

Look at you.
Have I not
looked there—

possibility for
—into it?
How small,

without effort almost,
can be the leap from
it-is-findable to

we-have-found-it.
Though not water,
not the flash, even,

as if off of that which
could be water, could
also not be—

To have
called it water. "They
crossed themselves,

they gave
utterly themselves over
to what

wasn't there,
that it might
save, or drown them…”

041

Brian Simoneau @briansimoneau.bsky.social · 10/12/2023

Jon Anderson, "The Secret of Poetry" from The Milky Way: Poems 1967-1982 (Ecco, 1983)

THE SECRET OF POETRY

When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.

I suppose this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning

Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.

When I met my wife I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.

I suppose this error will go on & on.
Mornings I kiss my wife's cold lips,

Nights her body, dripping with mist.
This is the error that fascinates.

I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.

I'd like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty

Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

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