Mobile Photography – Saturday Poetry – “Flickering” by David Rivard
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘Flickering’ by David Rivard. “David Rivard was born in Fall River, Massachusetts. His collections of poetry include Torque (1988), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Wise Poison (1996), winner of the James Laughlin Award, Bewitched Playground (2000), Sugartown (2005), and Otherwise Elsewhere (2010). He has also been a contributor to such publications as Ploughshares, The New England Review, and Poetry, and is a former editor of The Harvard Review.
His awards and honors include the Pushcart Prize, the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Hardison Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Rivard teaches in the University of New Hampshire MFA Program in Writing”. Source: Poetry Foundation
Source: David Rivard, “Flickering” from Standoff. Copyright ©2016 by David Rivard, via Poetry Foundation
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‘Flickering’ by David Rivard
“I see you,” she says—
one of the flickering homeless with gray
alehouse hair, pale blue
eyes, crunchy lips—a methadone-
troubled moth by the YMCA—but who
does she see?—is it
the chubby, right-handed schoolboy
sent out by the nuns
at St. Joseph’s to clap
the chalkboard erasers clean?
Or the giddy
teenage shipping clerk at lunch break
smoking pot for the first time
behind a curtain factory
shed? Perhaps the middle-aged
mortgagee? Maybe an ex-
proofreader in lawyerland or betraying husband?
Maybe the good loser? How about
the new father smiling in tears?
Why not
the complainer’s
ally, or the devoted wanker,
or the inert
doubter, or the annoyancer
or toddler?—
if not the circumspect bald man,
crank, or
unselfish lecturer—
or does she see each of them?—
maybe each
would like
a lantern to carry;
tho there are
nowhere
near enough lamps
for all.
David Rivard, “Flickering” from Standoff. Copyright © 2016 by David Rivard Source:PoetryFoundation
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