Early Epstein. As I've often noted, it can be difficult to look over work from a long time ago. And a bit confusing. Is it the poems which we outgrew, superseded in skill and command, or is it merely that we've changed--not necessarily improved--so that what interested or impressed us once does so no longer? This seems to me to hold up better than most of what I was writing then. It appeared in the British magazine Seam.
It was all there and then all gone.
There must have been a time at which
he didn't see the warning signs--
the drop in temperature in rooms
he entered or the shabby food,
sentimental occasions they
let slip by or slept through. When he
himself awoke and found the house
empty, the children gone, the dogs
gone too, their snapped chains on the ground,
the weeds knee high, the weather changed,
one of the cars absconded with,
the battery of the other dead,
he figured he had overlooked
something he probably should have seen.
5 comments:
That's pretty a cool poem right there. I like how it leaves me wondering; who broke the dog's chains?!
Nice to run into you every now and then, like here or On E. Colfax, or in the Country of Belle Livres.
Jeff Roberts
Jeff,
Inspiriting to see someone reading in the archives here, encountering a poem months after it was posted. I assume you weren't looking for "poems about dead grandfathers" or "friction poems" or "tapirs copulating in captivity," which seem to be people's usual entrance ramps to old posts.
Nope, just seeing what you've been up to.
Seems quiet in here. Kids grown - or in the basement smokin'?
J
Thanks for sharing. Reminds me a little of Kooser’s “Abandoned Farmhouse” . Especially Love the “let slip by or slept through”
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