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Kate Northrop on

Published in Poem Of The Day

(tired and high-pitched)

Ghosts have been tied into the trees.
At dawn they pivot
In the wind slowly.

Where the moon windows in
I am of those
Who can't stand it

Kept awake, humming with trucks
While anything lunar
Won't rut, ruminates. Overhead, uh-hunh-

Days, the neighbor's girl plays a game: what is?
What is dusk, she says, as the sky
ends it begins.

I play myself. What is death? What's poetry? What
Is time? Time needs no hanky, time blows by
the Kleenex flowers. Or time's

so slow, starry-cold, even is cold
and sure, little admonishments.

Were you awake all night?
I was. I was awake all night.



About this poem
"I wrote a draft of this poem after taking my dog for a pre-dawn walk during which the predictable had looked strange, especially those ghosts that go up in the trees around Halloween. I wrote the poem to get closer to those ghosts, to think through the image of them, although the speaker of the poem tries (unsuccessfully, I think) to get away from them."
-Kate Northrop

About Kate Northrop
Kate Northrop is the author of "Clean" (Persea Books, 2011). She teaches at the University of Wyoming and lives in Laramie, Wyo.


***
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Kate Northrop. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate




 


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