Robert Farnsworth has published his poetry in magazines throughout the U.S., in Canada and the UK, including the Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly, Ploughshares,TriQuarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Malahat Review, Poetry & Audience, etc., and in three collections Three or Four Hills and A Cloud (Wesleyan University Press, 1982); Honest Water (Wesleyan University Press, 1989); and Rumored Islands (Harbor Mountain Press, 2010). For seven years he edited […]
At two each day the driver- education car pulls up to browse beneath our maple, idling in shadows. Behind the wheel a youth is bent on behaving. Hand over hand he grinds the gravel under his tires, looking back down the road’s green vault to a stop sign. He stares a long time, […]
Over the phone, through which we struggled so clumsily those many years ago, I now try to describe the process of loading the camera. But I haven’t the vocabulary to convey the steps, which aren’t difficult, just (for a decade’s worth of my having done them by touch) inarticulable. And we almost tumble […]
Now that, he was almost thinking, was beautiful, wasn’t it? Thrust across the pearl-sheened window some sketchy twigs and one heavy, black snow-doubled branch, and from it a glossy crow’s oblique chandelle away: baton arc, smoke script, fled pendulum, a second’s, the hour’s famously ordinary signature, fleeting route, at the after-fling of which he […]
From an American early autumn evening flung back into tomorrow’s afternoon, I sat a while in the car park, smoking over a map, then for practice drove west to a neglected town, where transatlantic flying boats set down seventy years ago, and on the silent pier beside their museum, imagined back the long white scuds […]
So he must so he stands up from within outlandish leaves, casts away the rifle, tries on a smile he’s never felt his face make before, and as they approach gazes down the valley of the unpronounceable river, whose stony shallows, when he’d scrambled to this refuge, had quietly bickered in the dark, and now […]
for Georgia Remember the sculptor you modeled for — the long afternoons at his estate? All his precious metals deny my tastes now, the drift of recollection this depends on, but […]
after Wallace Stevens Read late a winter’s night. Feel the rooms around, The rooms within the mind resist the dark. The fire burns as the novel taught it how. Summer’s sounding bowl may ripen clouds In the pages you pay out beside the hearth. Read late this winter night, and the […]