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Another Poem

Geoffrey G. O'Brien on

Published in Poem Of The Day

I bypassed all the compromise,
The first ten problems of speech
And the latest, the sharpest, the contest,
Then began, having already fallen,
To rise just less, weaker than
My chore, yours, made else
By othering, by day by day,
The schedules, the routes, task
Whose claim I forgot to throw off,
Rising less but somewhat up anyway
With a kind of strength for having
Done so several times before.
I mean all times so far
Which is the taste of coffee gone
This latest one, and that it sticks
Like nothing else has ever done.
It isn't a calamity so much
As a disaster that it's not one.
Things already were real, are
Never just. Did not just get,
Can't help being so. This
Massive ordinary cloud
Where I surrendered to
Filling out a form in the rain
That doesn't come or does,
Sent down or kept in overplus
Till the next storm's approved,
The face notified of its context,
The sequence continuing west
West I said west, turning up
To receive some all,
To celebrate that share of sense
Breaking into day then run
After it as through gray games
I plan to win by losing only
Every time but one, the next
To last or after that, though
What it's called when it comes
I don't, I do, pretend to know.



About this poem
"'Another Poem' is what it says, another instance of effort in a loop or line of trying. It maps compositional ordinariness onto other more 'trying' routines-waking for work, fueling with coffee, filling out forms and filling forms out, enduring weather-the 'gray games' within which something else can happen: poetry, love, struggle. The poem is neither particularly pessimistic nor optimistic, but as documentary as its descriptive title; maybe it does permit itself to try to hear, in the word 'west,' a version of Molly Bloom's 'yes' that ends 'Ulysses,' that epic of movement through the quotidian."
-Geoffrey G. O'Brien

About Geoffrey G. O'Brien
Geoffrey G. O'Brien is the author of "People on Sunday" (Wave Books, 2013). He teaches English at University of California, Berkeley, and San Quentin State Prison and lives in Berkeley, Calif.

***
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 Geoffrey G. O'Brien. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate




 


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