Poetry Magazine
Clover
On a brain-gray day,
he lay on the hill-slanted solar
array with a southern exposure,
toes in the clover
mixed in with what are these
pentagrammatic sprays
of pinnate leaves.
No clover
here has four leaves:
to each one he says
I have seen you before
in the nuclear hazard
symbol and then again (as
again slants backward)
before that, as nothing but clover
when childhood was not yet over
and everything was symbol therefore
nothing was.
Source: Poetry (November 2011).
Biography
Theodore Zachary Cotler was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1981 and raised in Marin County, California. Cotler earned a BA in English from Cornell University in 2003 and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2008. His first book of poems is House with a Dark Sky Roof (2011). His poems have recently appeared in Poetry, the Wolf, the Frogmore Papers, the Paris Review, Narrative, Republic of Letters, and other . . .
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Living, Coming of Age
Poetic Terms Free Verse
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