Matthew Tuckner
Near the end of his life, the artist painted six coffins
egg-shell white, filling them with the cadavers

of diseased sea stars found in tidepools
along the coast of San Luis Obispo.

When we enter the gallery, you spill the contents
of your tote bag into a metal tray: camera lens, pill organizer,

a fragment of orange rind shaped like Florida,
a bottle of smartwater, dyed gold with powdered electrolytes.

We know what’s coming. We’ve been texting back and forth
famous last words as a way of making light of it,

a record of the mind speaking to the mind in dulcet tones,
reminding the mind it is still here, for now.

Heraclitus: Can you turn wet water into dry?
Caligula: I am still very much alive.

It appears that what will happen, hasn’t happened yet.
So we fill the time with projects, Tokyo, memories

of its greedy koi fish, a ceramic bowl
of goji berries perfectly balanced on a tree branch.

We fatten the time until it bursts into artifacts:
sixteen photographs of a single puddle

taking shape in the red glow of your darkroom.
A puddle you glimpsed the moon in, & stopped for.

A puddle that was just plain rain until it fell.
from the journal ADROIT
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
This poem—one in a series of identically titled pieces—reflects my belief in the symbiotic relationship between ekphrasis and elegy. Many of the poems in this series are set in museums and galleries—palimpsestic spaces filled with objects we pour pieces of ourselves into, in the hope that they will outlast us.

Matthew Tuckner on "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
Color headshot of poet Maggie Millner
"Short Conversations with Poets: Maggie Millner"

"It was only after I had written several pages of rhyming couplets that I became aware of the form’s innate connection to romance and homoeroticism in particular: the very subjects that the poem explores. This made sense too; rhyme is at least in part about tapping into the unconscious—about foregrounding those hidden correspondences that already exist all around us."

via MCSWEENEYS
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of Daniela Naomi Molnar's book, Chorus
What Sparks Poetry:
Daniela Naomi Molnar on "chorus 27 / Ojito Canyon / what consoles does wondering console"

"Poetry is borne of an elemental urge to connect with the deep time wildness of language. Like a poem, language is an ecosystem, made of the same stuff we’re made of, which is the same stuff the planet is made of. To speak a word, we move air through the fiery earth of our body, from the wet inside skin of lungs out through the watery trachea by the muscled earthwater of the tongue."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2023 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency