[The order of islands here]

By Michael Palmer b. 1943 Michael Palmer

The order of islands here

If you take it

will I give it back

at two o’clock

Will you hold it

in my hand

And the relation to an eyelid

by the quantity of light

As in

His story’s impossible to read

As in

We’ll see it just in time

whenever we find it

missing

Michael Palmer, "[The order of islands here]" a part from The Book Against Understanding from The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995. Copyright © 1998 by Michael Palmer. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

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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