When I painted, everybody saw.
When I played piano, everybody heard.
I ate your raspberries.
The sign no trespassing applied to me.
Now, the hemlocks have grown higher than the house.
There’s moss on my stoop, a little mildew
In the shower but you’ve never seen my shower.
I can undress by the window,
I can sleep in the barn.
The sky, which is cloudy,
Suits the earth to which it belongs.
Source: Poetry (September 2012).
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This poem originally appeared in the September 2012 issue of Poetry magazine
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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Poems by James Longenbach