Dave Lucas

In this day and age only a fool goes looking for the lost city. Drunks and suckers, or worse.

Even here. Even now the heavy industry
of the everyday, making to be unmade,
where a word is the world between us.

It follows you everywhere,
I think, even this hillside
of mint and yellow gorse
on the far side of the sea,

Forgive me, 
I have smuggled them away
from my father’s house to this sodden pitch
in the middle of my life, their names 
asleep under my tongue. I have walked

I would be Diogenes. Swing my lamp
through these dishonest days in search.
I myself have looked the known world
over and given everything a new name.

Imagine you could learn 
the names of every river,
each upthrust mountain
and fault folded on itself:

I cannot remember the last meal I shared with my father.
Only those long last nights slipping him what ice chips
he could still stomach and then swabbing his chapped lips
with a wetted pink sponge.

I had just taken her photograph.
Everyone else crowded on the back deck, 
talking, flirting, admiring the silver
of sunset in their drinks. 

I descended into the underworld again
in my dream and there for the umpteenth time 
stood my father in a plaid button-down shirt
and khakis a freshly lit pipe a wreath of smoke 

Autumn and its thousand adjectives have come
to this, a swither in the trees,
their limbs bronchial and backlit in the gloam.

The dissenting and disorganized Clinton campaign is ill-prepared for this extended endgame.

As his reputation has grown, however, into that oxymoronic epithet “famous poet,” Strand has engaged that self, satirized it, and refashioned it as a subject for his poems. If Richard Howard is right when he says that “the poems . . . narrate the moment when Strand makes Rimbaud’s discovery, that je est un autre, that the self is someone else, even something else”—then in the early poems the Strand persona rejects itself.

And in the later poems the Strand persona mocks the persona of Mark Strand.