The Tuesday Platform

Geoffrey G. O’Brien (May 10, 1969) is an American poet. Educated at Harvard University and University of Iowa, he has taught at Brooklyn College, The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been a Distinguished Poet in Residence at St. Mary's College of California. I recently came across a poem written by him was deeply touched by the emotion in his writing:

May

This is a love poem. It has no business. It happens

in that anyway world where the bodies are by now
decided to get all the way up, accompanied

by changes in temperature and light welcome and
unwelcome both, lie down, get up, go prone again,

get nowhere in time. I won’t reduce to a single
preposition a relation to the one person about it 

like grass. Who has a pronoun, a name, three or
four even, which globe, without containing,
her experience, of which I chase awareness till  

her letters are with one exception all over this
deepening sheet, name- blind blue of a cloudless
day. Unconcerned with property disputes,
the poem gradually permits itself to figure grass,
the blue of the sky because we see those first kinds

of immense quiet as sleepers while walking the dog
in the hills and store them for future use as simile
and metaphor, each ancient and suspiciously free of
present disaster. (Read full poem here)

As a poet, O’Brien is meditative, given to neither satire nor parody and is anything but un-selfconsciously literal, the highs and lows keep the reader engrossed, but most of the poem's appeal is found in quiet passages, in the rich detail and the savouring of moments.

Welcome to the Tuesday Platform, the weekly open stage for sharing poems in the Imaginary Garden. Please link up a poem, old or new, and spend some time this week visiting the offerings of our fellow writers.

SHARE * READ * COMMENT * ENJOy