Waiting There

By Michael Anania b. 1939 Michael Anania

As others or ourselves

let’s say—furtive, then,

inconsequent and sad—

or on the edge of thought,

perhaps, or into some

predictable meandering,

the outward accelerations

of water against its shore

dissipating into erosions,

cuts and counter-cuts,

remembered as landscape,

the convenient certainties

of an abandoned past.

Is it tree or treeline

or the massing of leaves

against the sky or color

freed from shadow or something

of color deepening against shade,

the sensible bluff that heaves

above the bluff’s presumed

insensible marl? River,

again, always enclosed

by its own turnings, its

own turnings overgrown.

Michael Anania, “Waiting There” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by Michael Anania. Used by permission of Asphodel Press/Acorn Alliance.

Source: Selected Poems (1994)

Biography

In the afterword to his first book, the 1969 New Poetry Anthology, Michael Anania wrote, "There is little evidence that modernism is dead or even dying. The tradition of Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens and their contemporaries is very much alive." Anania's importance as a poet lies in how he preserves and develops this modernist tradition in American poetry. A deep commitment to modernism and the tradition of experimental, often . . .

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