light plays on the planetlong enough to tell timethe bird tells time by the sundialthe sundial by the birdtime will tell the bird a talethe sundial’s never hearda tale as long as the riverbankfrom here to the hydroelectric plantman-o-man, the bird will thinkas it sails above the riverthe plant is not a plantthe bank is not a bankthe bird alights on a branchof the river, the bank, a treethe bird leaves the tree leavesbehind on the stageof the play it pages through
Sundial Tone
Garrett Caples
After Alfred Starr Hamilton
Feature Date
- June 22, 2024
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“Sundial Tones” from LOVERS OF TODAY: by Garrett Caples.
Published by Wave Books on October 5, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Garrett Caples.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Garrett Caples is the author of Proses: Incomparable Parables! Fabulous Fables! Cruel Tales! (Wave Books, 2024), Lovers of Today (Wave Books, 2021), Power Ballads (Wave Books, 2016), Complications (2007), and The Garrett Caples Reader (1999), a collection of outtakes, The Rise & Fall of Johnny Volume (2020), and a bilingual selection, Noches Apátridas (Unstated Nights, 2019). He’s also written a book of essays, Retrievals (2014), and a pamphlet, Quintessence of the Minor (2010). He’s the editor of Philip Lamantia’s Preserving Fire: Selected Prose (2018), Samuel Greenberg’s Poems from the Greenberg MSS (2019), and Michael McClure’s Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems (2021), as well as the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013), Particulars of Place (2015) by Richard O. Moore, Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (2016) by Frank Lima, and Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader (2019). He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco.
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