ENTER A SUBMISSION TO PLUME

Thomas Lux

Plume
The Day
The Day
January 28, 2016 Lux Thomas

The Day

 

Day I didn’t blink and the day was gone.
Day I woke up on an anatomist’s table,
Day my mother, her head on the dayroom slab…
Day sails appeared, and then disappeared.
No rain came one day for 200.
Man mis-interpreted God one day, and again the next.
The oleaginous world, one day, becomes non-oleaginous.
God interpreted man and got it wrong: took a day.
My father fell into me from his deathbed: that day.
The day blank called to stop me vaporing on: happy day.
Sleet cut cold air eight days in one day.

THOMAS LUX is Bourne Professor of Poetry at The Georgia Institute of Technology. He directs the McEver Visiting Writers Program and Poetry@Tech. He has published over a dozen books of poetry; his most recent isSelected Poems 1982-2012 (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2014). His forthcoming books are To the Left of Time (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), and an edited volume, Selected Poems of Bill Knott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also received the Kingsley Tufts Award for his book, Split Horizon.

Plume: Issue #55 February 2016

By the same author

Ode to Scars
Ode to Scars
The scars on others’ faces draw me to them.
Soup Teachers
Soup Teachers
we called them, the women who stood behind