he moves through dead-scrub and leaves, between lindens stripped for winter. Under the vaults of the creepers he moves, and through a whole century of second growth that shaped the land and everything beneath it: the incrops of rock, the wells bled dry. So much to lie down in. So much to cover himself with […]
Limbed Pisces, dawn of the Ram, when my mother’s hips push me into lamplight and time. This is where one voice ends and another begins, with a child bearing another child, some low line of election continuing, a rabbit’s foot stroked in a pocket. Little cricket, little salt-boy straddling two seasons, making noise in a […]
First the sea came true and then the land because the bones of their followers found hard earth, foothold and roothold, pine-pitch stains on their clothes. Clouds memorized them and moved on, cool shadows pulled by a pagan wind. Because every false doctrine stingeth like a viper, they built a gun-port and fort, a row […]
I was bored until I began rigging catastrophes: pitfalls, tree snares, explosions. I dug a hole in the woods, hoping that something would fall and snap a leg. I shot at aerosol cans to burst the forest silence. Shrapnel tore through ferns. Rodents fled along branches. And the trees bored me because I’d climbed their […]
yellow meant forsythia or scorched grass and black meant mold on the foundation or the leaves of the trash trees burned. And brown was a post-hole proving something, dirt that built character while the sharp smell of foliage filled the air. Thin and greening, while seasons brushed through my hair, I became sibling to the […]
Snow came to us then, and I was content to die under queer clouds that burned over the fort. The spades seemed to multiply, leaning everywhere: against fences and coops, even against pews, and their handles were as long and terrifying as the whoops we sometimes took for tribal men, but they were nothing, just […]
David Roderick, author of Blue Colonial, reads one of his favorite poems, Pike, by Ted Hughes, and discusses why it affects him.
David Roderick, author of Blue Colonial, talks about the most difficult obstacle he encounters to being a poet.