Floyd Skloot

Thomas Hardy in the Dorset County Museum
September 11, 2014 Skloot Floyd

Thomas Hardy in the Dorset County Museum

 

Turned sideways in a desk chair,

elbow perched on its top rail,

the life-size cardboard Thomas Hardy

looks wary. Even when no one is here

Hardy sits tight, certain something

must take him from happy solitude.

Work is everywhere now, a poem’s

lines whirling in a figure-eight above

his head, chapter one of a novel

looming behind him, rough drafts

of letters under glass at his knee.

Apologizing, knowing he never liked

being touched, I drape my arm over

his shoulder as my wife takes our picture.

He is much younger than I am,

not the sage Hardy with wizened face,

wispy hair and waxed mustache tips.

His beard is darker, thicker, his hair

shorter, but the matching domes

of our foreheads are enough to

let me feel what I have come all

this way to feel. It is time to move on

to the place where he was born.

Floyd Skloot‘s ninth collection of  poems, FAR WEST, was published last year by LSU Press, which has given the book its L.E. Phiiabaum Poetry Award for 2019. LSU also published his collections THE END OF DREAMS (2006), THE SNOW’S MUSIC (2008) and APPROACHING WINTER (2015). His work has won three Pushcart Prizes, The PEN USA Literary Award, and been included in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS, BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING, BEST SPIRITUAL WRITING and BEST FOOD WRITING anthologies.