Poetry Magazine
And So the Skin . . .
And so their pounded hearts
were worn—
like a badge
or talisman,
that canceled
almost all their blindness—
creation's linkage depending
on a drive itself
derived from a kind of kindness
or desperation, the sense that one's
inadequate,
at any rate
the space for time—
water has it, flowing
(even from a faucet . . .)
and here the black swan glides across it—
as the sunlight's suddenly on my back,
and now the skin along it's warmer,
Lord,
which lets me walk by the river . . .
Source: Poetry (June 2008).
Biography
Peter Cole’s new collection of poems, The Invention of Influence, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2014.
Poems by Peter Cole
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