Maureen N. McLane
Just as I must draw
to see
the world eclipse
itself before
my oblivious eyes
as I must draw to register
the retinal
flash of reality
effects my brain insists
on generating
to help me live
"life"
"not working out
too terribly well but I think
I'll keep going"
optimism
ridiculous
not to honor
the upsurge
as the dog frisks in the street
and the students smoke & glower & parse
their way
into situations
they forget
in a decade
but the smoke haze
lingering in the old walls of the rue Suger
however often cleaned
life
a revenge
upon memory
I disbelieve
in continuous
ribbons of identity
yet who else
did that past
happen to
waylay
last night
in the dream
that had me
up against the remembered wall
from the bookMORE ANON/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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This poem is from my second book, "World Enough," and distills a lot on my mind then and now: time spent in Paris (living on the rue Suger, in the student quarter); thoughts on memory, identity, dis/continuity; questions of perception and the sensorium; how dreams can give you back aspects of your own experience.  And life study: a genre of painting, a mode of attentiveness, of ceaseless questioning: as Shelley wrote in “The Triumph of Life”: “Then, what is life?”
Color photograph of Robert Frost's home in Shaftsbury, Vermont

"One hundred and one years ago, Robert Frost and his family moved to an 18th-century stone-and-clapboard house in Shaftsbury. The poet, who four decades later would be named the first poet laureate of Vermont, lived in the house for nine years—writing poems, tending an apple orchard, raising chickens and walking in the woods."

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Cover of Emily Kendal Frey's book, Lovability

"In Lovability, poem after poem seeks discernment against this agony, to untangle the sticky web of the imagined, the hoped for, the dreaded, the real, and encounter each unbraced. Perhaps this is the only project that matters. Perhaps it’s one of the most difficult things a person undergoes: the dismantling of dream, assumption, expectation, prejudice, in order to see clearly and honestly."
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