Ralph Angel

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October 19, 2015 Angel Ralph

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it’s harder to be patient when you’re helpless

things make of themselves memorable

my own face forbids it

ten-thousand windmills exhausted and visible

smoke rose like smoke from a chimney

“where will the thicket be?”

 

like an umbrella on top of a horse’s back

like an elephant riding a mouse

restrained the jewelry that hangs in the garden

simplified the garments

a coffee

 

and the fish leapt

and the bees drowned

how many times you kiss my eyes

my parrot-colored spring

 

snow water

and three strides

and the eighteen vertebrae I bend to pray

Ralph Angel’s latest collection, Your Moon, was awarded the 2013 Green Rose Poetry Prize. Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 received the 2007 PEN USA Poetry Award, and his Neither World won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. In addition to five books of poetry, he also has published an award-winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song. Angel is the recipient of numerous honors, including a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, a Gertrude Stein Award, the Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association. He lives in Los Angeles, and is Edith R. White Distinguished Professor at the University of Redlands, and a member of the MFA in Writing faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.