Twenty-four Logics in Memory of Lee Hickman

By Michael Palmer b. 1943 Michael Palmer

The bend in the river followed us for days

and above us the sun

doubled and redoubled its claims

Now we are in a house

with forty-four walls

and nothing but doors

Outside the trees, chokecherries, mulberries and oaks

are cracking like limbs

We can do nothing but listen

or so someone claims,

the Ice Man perhaps, all enclosed in ice

though the light has been shortening our days

and coloring nights the yellow of hay,

scarlet of trillium, blue of block ice

Words appear, the texture of ice,

with messages etched on their shells:

Minna 1892, Big Max and Little Sarah,

This hour ago

everyone watched as the statues fell

Enough of such phrases and we’ll have a book

Enough of such books

and we’ll have mountains of ice

enough to balance our days with nights

enough at last to close our eyes

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 . . .

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