Friday, May 1, 2015

Poem for the Weekend: Jeffrey McDaniel

 

Author of five books of poetry and the recipient of an NEA fellowship, Jeffrey McDaniel teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. His poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and sometimes, he performs them live. You can watch another one here. But for my quiet, quiet week, here's this one:

The Quiet World

by Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred   
and sixty-seven words, per day.
 
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   
without saying hello. In the restaurant   
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   

I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,   
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line   
and listen to each other breathe.

Related Posts:

  • Poem for the Weekend Robert Creeley attended Harvard and was, at one time or another, an ambulance driver, chicken farmer, expatriate and publisher. He was said to be inf… Read More
  • Poem for the Weekend   This week's poem is by Li-Young Lee, who is of Chinese ancestry but was born in Indonesia. He and his family emigrated to the U.S… Read More
  • Poem for the Weekend: Anne Shaw Anne Shaw is an artist, a poet, a student of sculpture at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and the founder of the Twitter Poetry Project. … Read More
  • Poem for the Weekend - Maya Angelou   Maya Angelou may be our best known modern American poet. Friend of Oprah and the Clintons, writer, professor, feminist and civil rights act… Read More
  • Poem for the Weekend   Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been a student, an expatriate, a political activist, a publisher, a key player in the Beat movement, and he&nb… Read More

0 comments:

Post a Comment

"As soon as we express something, we devalue it strangely. We believe ourselves to have dived down into the depths of the abyss, and when we once again reach the surface, the drops of water on our pale fingertips no longer resemble the ocean from which they came...Nevertheless, the treasure shimmers in the darkness unchanged." ---Franz Kafka