Reginald Shepherd
Posted in Past Guests | Tagged N-S
Poet and editor Reginald Shepherd was born in New York City in 1963 and grew up in the Bronx. After earning his BA from Bennington College, Shepherd studied at Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first three titles, Some Are Drowning, Otherhood, and Fata Morgana received wide critical acclaim. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and many other honors. He died in 2008.
You, Therefore
—for Robert Philen
You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, and aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
where there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name
Links
- Poet’s blog
- “On Difficulty in Poetry.” The Writer’s Chronicle. May/Summer 2008.
- “On Beauty.” Crossroads. Spring 2001.
Media
Reading with George O’Brien | March 23, 2000