Some mornings, leaving my girlfriend's
    house, I'd glimpse my whole existence,

all its eras, as a single arc—unified, unbroken.
    I saw a person who kissed mostly men,

wrote poems in the prevailing style, owned a cat.
    I saw a different person after that,

and before, I saw a little girl.
    What was I saying? That there were

these different selves—I need you to see them—
    they were shapes made out of lines, and then

one day they all began to cross, the lines,
    as if by some obscure design

the analysis of which became the purpose
    of my life. Or maybe the pattern was

my life, and its analysis
    merely my living. Sexuality is,

after all, a formal concern:
    finding for one's time on earth

a shape that feels more native than imposed—
    a shape in which desire, having chosen

it, can multiply.
    And isn't love itself a type

of rhyme? And don't gender and genre share one root?
    Maybe I really am a poet,

needing as I do from these imperfect sets,
    which constitute a self, the lie of sense.
from the book COUPLETS / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
Han VanderHart Interviewed by Erin Hoover

"Centering our authors at River River Books is sustainable in part because we are against the capitalist model of growth and expansion for their own sake. The beauty of small presses is that they are small, especially in their attentions. Linda Gregg’s 'we manage most when we manage small' is close to our press vision."

via SOUTHERN REVIEW OF BOOKS
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of Missing Department
What Sparks Poetry:
Matt Donovan on Other Arts


"Yet, as with each of the blackout poems I wrote for our Missing Department project (twenty-five in all), there were always more resonant and unexpected meanings to explore beyond any words the two texts happened to share. Although I might have been initially pleased to make a connection between the mother's address in Klamath Falls and the story's descriptions of a river that ran through the center of its fictional town, for instance, the presence of moving water ended up affording me the poem's core metaphor."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
donate
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2023 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency