Cy Twombly, Untitled (To Sappho) (1976)
As if life itself were rung like
rain from the evening air-drenched in a
mist of what's missing: a hyacinth
in gray scale or windy gaps in
the erased spaces where the
dotted line of lineated mountains
once stood. I imagine your poems-trampled
and hoof-hewn, rent and riven by
a great beast not even the godlike shepherds
could contain. How. Then. Now. Once. Until.
Nothing is ever wholly whole. We are only
that which survives, even in our absence, like a
a night sky the sinking sun streaks with purple.
How to say in a poem that Breonna Taylor's death is a stain
on a country, yes, but also on history? Tell me: what remains?
What endures beyond the blurred words of men on
duty? In office? You once wrote: Those I treat well are the
ones who most of all harm me. O lost ones: I ask to end with any word but ground.
Poetry Reed Diffuser by Dean Rader
$15.00Price
Dean Rader has authored or co-authored fourteen books, including Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, named a Barnes & Noble Best Book, and Works & Days, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, appeared in 2023. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
