Sonnet: Now I see them

By Michael Palmer b. 1943 Michael Palmer

Now I see them sitting me before a mirror.

There’s noise and laughter. Somebody

mentions that hearing is silver

before we move on to Table One

with the random numbers. I look down

a long street containing numbers.

A white four leans against the fence

and disappears. In the doorway

is the seven, then the x

painted red so you can find it

more easily. Five goes by

without its cap. My father wears

the second x. He has a grey cloud

for a face, and dark lines for arms.

Michael Palmer, "Sonnet: Now I see them" a part from Series 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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