Kasey Jueds
Who keeps your secrets
now?—now that the grain you kept
to feed the winter herd
is gone, the cows long gone
from the stalls where not even
their ghosts shift in the cold-
sealed dim and imagine
pasture. The metal rungs
that climb your side start
halfway up and hang useless,
now that you are made
of silence, of cinderblocks
encircling air. Who calls
the sparrows to cling
to the rim of you, and trace
their momentary outlines
against the flux of sky?
Do you know that sometimes
I hear my lover in another
room, and think for a moment
he is the one I told myself
I loved before, the one
who hurt me? Little engine
of the mind stuttering, little
needle skipping against
the record's black disc
where it hits the scratched
place, the damage—before
someone lifts the player's arm
and shifts it so the song
can go on. Please tell me
you remember the time my new love
and I found our way
through the wrecked barn's
understory, and unbolted
the door that led to you.
We could finally see inside
to where animal skeletons
gleamed in the circle of grass
at your base—not, of course,
the cows, but wild things
trapped, unable to scale
your steep sides to the mute
O far above, the open mouth
muffled by cloud. Who could
tell us how the animals came
to die there, fell or strayed
into something finished? Who
could give us the story we thought
we wanted to hear? And which one
of us thought to call you
ruined then, which one
to name you almost beautiful?
from the book THE THICKET / University of Pittsburgh Press
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Poems remind me to pay attention to things I might normally overlook, things I think I already know. This disused silo is so much part of a familiar-to-me landscape that I almost don't see it—but writing toward it brought me closer to its ghosts and layers, its secret life that continues in spite of abandonment.

Kasey Jueds on "The Silo"
"Peter Gizzi on Michael Gizzi's Poem 'Requiem in March'"

"The poem, 'Requiem in March,' contains the lines, 'if it was only a plane crash / why didn't you walk from the wreckage?' Those lines floored me. Their words amazed me. What Michael had written was the only true thing that could have been said about what had happened. It was so true, in fact, that when I read those words a light went on that still burns. With majesty and mystery, poetry can say the truth and transform reality while posing the hardest questions."

via POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA
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What Sparks Poetry: 
John Robert Lee on Philip Larkin's "Church Going"

"I took, and still take, however subsumed, his neo-formal poetic forms, unfussy, concentrated, a modest musical tone playing on half rhymes and perhaps above all, the finely detailed and close, film-like observation of the world around him, physical, natural, and emotional. 'Church Going' was one of the poems I copied as I learned from him how to shape such pointed, accurate stanzas."
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