Out of the body of the beloved: the love
that bears one name as it sheds the olderyounger body, the way a god sheds
the blood of characters in books we love.Out of our mistakes over dinner,
listening poorly: a better, kinder mistake.Could it be our idolatries have less
to do with the fallen world of objects.More with the fall, a failure to listen
to the silence there, in the namesand images whose spirit is not theirs.
Not ours. Where a mother was, the wordmother. And the voice that was hers
laid into the silence she needs to speak.When my mother died, I had no words.
She was always interrupting that way.(Out of the black car, the child in black.)
And it took letting go to hear her again.(Out of the updraft: the leaves of birds.)
A give in the wind to absolve the branches.Out of the younger face: a father’s chin,
a mother’s nervous tic, a newborn stranger.
31
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- December 8, 2018
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Copyright © 2018 by Bruce Bond
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of Ml, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), and Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017). Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas.
Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods by Bruce Bond is one of the winners of the 17th Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. Laura Kasischke had this to say about it: “Bruce Bond has written a book length poem of spectacular beauty- incantatory, shocking, full of wild imagery and eerie juxtapositions. This is a book to be read in a sitting, cover to cover, at first, in order to experience the full power of its accumulating force. But it’s also a book the reader will return to over and over, one that continues to offer surprises and deeper insights, more rewards and greater epiphanies. Bruce Bond is a poet of extraordinary talent, a poet whose lifetime of devotion to his art has brought us this stunning and entirely new vision. However, in Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods, we see not only all that such a poet is able to accomplish, but all that poetry itself accomplishes.”
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