Wheel

By Michael Palmer b. 1943 Michael Palmer

You can say the broken word but cannot speak

for it, can name a precise and particular shade

of blue if you can remember its name

(Woman of the South, New Lilac, Second Sky?)

As the light, close to blinding, fell—falls

in bars across a particular page, this

then another, some other

followed far too closely by night

Or as the sleeping

pages recall themselves, one by one,

in dream-riddled, guarded tones,

recall themselves from path

to sloped meadow, meadow

to burnt shore, shore

to poised wave, dismay

to present, any present

of the bewildered and the buried alive

(we’ve been told they were buried alive)

Is there a door he hasn’t noticed

and beyond it a letter which created the door

or claims it created a door

which would open either way

Source: The Lion Bridge (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1998)

Biography

Michael Palmer was born in New York City and educated at Harvard in the early 1960s, where he encountered Confessional poetry. His opposition to Confessionalism found root in a developing poetics when he attended the landmark 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, a three-week gathering where he met Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Clark Coolidge. Correspondence with those three poets greatly influenced Palmer’s early development . . .

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