Buried Life

By James Longenbach James Longenbach

Imagine cities you’ve

Inhabited, streets

Paved in lava stone.

You never intended to pray

In the temples, had

Nothing to sell.

Now imagine yourself

Returning to those same cities.

Hunt for people you knew,

Knock on their doors.

Ask yourself

Where are the vases, animals

Etched in gold?

Where are the wines

From distant places,

Banquets ferreted

From the bowels of the earth?

While you were missing

Other people wore

Your garments,

Slept in your bed.

How frightening

The man who said

In his affliction

Wood has hope.

Cut down

It will flourish.

If the root grows old

And the trunk withers

In dust, at the scent of water

It will germinate.

Source: Draft of a Letter (The University of Chicago Press, 2007)

Biography

A poet as well as an influential literary critic and a professor of English at the University of Rochester, James Longenbach writes primarily on modernist and contemporary poetry. He is the author of the critical works Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (1988), Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (1991), Modern Poetry After Modernism (1997), The Resistance to Poetry (2004), and The Art of the Poetic Line . . .

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