Asked if it isn't weird to be at an awards ceremony with Gregory Peck,
Dylan says, "Well, listen, everything's weird. You tell me something
that's not weird." He might as well have said "big," that his songs are
a witness to magnitude, that your poems are. And why shouldn't they be?

Look at the epic of your life, at the people in it, all heroic. And to think
it began with an accident. Somebody looked up at the night sky and saw a star,

somebody in Cracow or Belgrade, maybe, or the city where you live now.
Carbon, nitrogen . . . there was an explosion, and now you have to pay attention

that's so popular, and you didn't say you wanted better, wanted more.

That same night, you met the man you'd love so hard it made your teeth hurt.
He said, "Hey, baby," and you snapped, "I'm not your baby."

I have nothing to say to you, really. I just want to see what I'm looking at.
I want so much not to listen to you after all this time but to hear.


About This Poem
"When my former student Jan Richardson's husband died unexpectedly, I wrote her, and before long, she sent me some poems. I found I couldn't stop thinking about a couple of Jan's lines, so I asked her if she minded my using them as a title for my own poem, one that is different from hers but that strives for the same intensity."
-David Kirby

About David Kirby
David Kirby is the author of "Get Up, Please" (Louisiana State University Press, 2016). He teaches at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee, Fla.

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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) 2016 David Kirby. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate