Happy Wednesday! Because it’s “hump day,” that means it’s time for another featured poem of the week. As always, the chosen poem has come from Poetry Daily, which is a very helpful website if you’re looking for some interesting poetry each day. They offer a varied range of poetry to spice up your day, so check them out. This week we feature the poem entitled Fauxbade, which is written by Heather Sellers.
According to her Poetry Daily biography, Heather Sellers “is the author of three volumes of poetry: Your Whole Life, Drinking Girls and their Dresses, and The Boys I Borrow. Her award-winning memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, was Editor’s Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and an O Book of the Month Club selection. She teaches poetry and nonfiction in the creative writing program at the University of South Florida, where she is at work on a collection of poems, The Vine, and a new memoir.”
Fauxbade, by Heather Sellers
I teach all day, get a weak signal at night,
Malbec, Idol, pasta, peas, cherries. Night, night.
Wake at three a.m. to wind-streaked dark, I know
death thinks about me, like a dog: we are present
to each other, afraid sometimes, but the relationship
is complex, without words, mostly wild, not fit
for inside a house, night. So I read the walls. Walk
the empty rooms like a vine. I begin, begin, begin, begin
nothing. Yesterday, I was rushing, signed an e-mail
Live, Heather, hit send, saw then, how I uncommanded
my death. Days are slow-coming, wide as
waves. The phone rings! My neighbor sees my light
at six in the morning, calls. It’s about the tree. I watch him
from my kitchen window, at his kitchen counter, phone
in hand. Will I give my blessing to take down the old
maple tree on our lot line? My neighbor is ninety-two
years old. The tree is in its eighties. Outside, at dawn,
we three meet on the lot line, look up, into the sky,
up into the heavy limbs, laced with vine, the deaf
branches, the darkness, the streaky light, the depth, the black
tree, the lines; we do not touch.
We do not touch any of it this morning.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s poem! For more of these, check the blog archives.
– Jet Fuel Blog Editor, Mary Egan
