I have never featured poems by the same poet on successive Sundays, but, if poetry teaches you anything, it’s that most rules are made to be broken. Besides, this week’s poem is perfect for today, as we have just turned the clocks back and, here, that leads the speaker to herself fall back, to a time when “my word-sprung yearning / rode its drifts …”
Poet Jennifer Moxley’s most recent collection is “Druthers” (Flood, 2018). Her book “The Open Secret” (Flood, 2014) won the 2015 William Carlos Williams award, and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts award. She is professor of poetry and poetics at the University of Maine.
After Turning the Clocks Back
By Jennifer Moxley
I rest my feet on the record crates,
wrap my cold hands around warm tea.
I listen to the radiator work to take
the chill from off the sleeping house.
The frost-gray grass is still, and yet
My mind is crowded. I long for
the ill-definition of my youth,
when I lay on warm park lawn
beneath a eucalyptus tree
and failed to read far in a great book.
Time was so slow and so thick
my word-sprung yearning
rode its drifts until, overpowered
by hunger, I fell asleep in the sun.
I did not know that I was happy.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Jennifer Moxley. It appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of poems, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
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