No Nonsense
split off for a secI thought I might say somethingtruthfulbut couldn’t come up with itand lingered in the rosy twilightunpacking an old suitcaseI found under the stairssometimes I stay as stillas possible and tell myselfa limitless vista’sopening up when it’s notthe rain pounded madly on the roofafterwards wesat on the porch shellingpeas and quoting scripturethe birds in the melaleuca treesseemed tiredthe skyreopened like a grocery storeon a desert roadI cameaway from myselfunstuckand a sort of translucentorderlinesslike a small herd of gazellesentered my mind
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- August 23, 2020
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“No Nonsense” from DEMO
W.W. Norton & Company
Copyright © 2020 by Charlie Smith
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
“Charlie Smith has always had an exquisite ear for the line, for the arresting phrase that sticks in the head and won’t go away. ‘I woke up still trying to understand things,’ he says in one poem, but that line could be the beginning of every poem in Demo. Here is a smart, gifted poet waking up again and again, startled by a world he didn’t make, but which he remakes brilliantly and word by word.”
—Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015
“A mastery such as Smith's is rare…The bounties furnished are great: pearls of understanding that circle some kind of holy instruction.”
—Kathleen Alcott, Los Angeles Review of Books
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