A Poet Reflects

Posts tagged Matthew Dickman:

July 5, 2012 with 17 notes

tags: Matthew Dickman. Palm Springs. poetry. swimming pool.

Outside the hotel room’s
sliding glass door
is a lemon tree, and each lemon
a milky yellow light
that has been lit for each milky
eyed day of depression
and each green leaf a different
self, a different kind
of process, of rehabilitation,
of brain, and brain-matter,
of the arrested heart, of vision—
I keep seeing the end of me
in the spaceship-blue
water of the swimming pool,
a deep-sea diver made out of smoke,
hovering in the shallow
end, being afraid like it always
is, the gear shaking, the face
not able to look at anyone
in the eye, in the two eyes,
my strange underwater self,
banging its head
against the drain, wanting
its mother, wanting its mother
to walk out of Cathedral City
in 1950, wearing penny-loafers
and high-water jeans,
I want to not have to think
about her all the time, have to
think about her like an alien
who has abducted me
and touched me
with the glowing end of a long
green finger, so now
I don’t know if I am the same
as I was, or forever changed
by the touch.

—Matthew Dickman, opening lines to ”Palm Springs” from The American Poetry Review (v.41 no.4, July/August 2012)

July 4, 2012 with 221 notes

tags: Cloud. loss. Matthew Dickman. poetry.

I found a white piece of paper
with your name on it
your old phone number written in the dark
loop of your handwriting.
I was standing outside a restaurant
watching this one cloud
float by like foam on a pint of beer
and thinking about how good
you’ve become at not being here anymore, how you
finally broke
like a storm across the sky of everything.

—Matthew Dickman, opening lines to “Cloud” from The American Poetry Review (v.41 no. 4, July/August 2012)

July 17, 2011 with 22 notes

tags: Grief. Matthew Dickman. poetry. The New Yorker.

Grief

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play here favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the checkout line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? she says,
reading the name out loud, slowly,
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

—Matthew Dickman, “Grief” first appeared in The New Yorker, May 5, 2008