H

By Michael Palmer b. 1943 Michael Palmer

Yet the after is still a storm

as witness bent shadbush

and cord grass in stillness

sand littered with the smallest of fragments

whether shell or bone

That city we are far from

is still frozen, still in ruins

(except its symmetries be renewed

by sleep, its slant colors redeemed)

Nothing has changed but its name

and the air that it breathes

There’s still no truth in making sense

while the ash settles, so fine that

planes keep falling from the sky

And the name once again to be the old one

Saint Something, Saint Gesture, Saint Entirely the Same

as if nothing or no one had been nameless in the interim

or as if still could be placed beside storm

that simply, as in a poem

Have you heard the angels with sexed tongues,

met the blind boy who could see with his skin,

his body curled inward like a phrase,

like an after in stillness or a letter erased

Have you seen what’s written on him

as question to an answer or calendar out of phase

Add up the number of such days

Add illness and lilt as formed on the tongue

Add that scene identical with its negative,

that sentence which refuses to speak,

present which cannot be found

Source: At Passages (New Directions, 1995)

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 . . .

Continue reading this biography