In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Anything but Standard
  • Edward Hirsch (bio)

It was the two of us, wasn’t it, on those steamy nights circling the low-slung museum across the street and lingering by the pond behind the chapel.

It’s how the southern clouds passed slowly overhead, season after season, year after year,

as you followed a low intricate scent across the stately-lit lawn, and studied the squirrels in the live oaks, and waded into the brown reflecting pool with the broken obelisk.

You were a descendent of water dogs and anything but standard when you materialized out of the sticky heat with your dripping black forehead and delinquent grin, a growl un-muzzled.

It was your Russian face that steadied me as I sat on a battered wooden bench lost in a night that wouldn’t end and you lay down—calm, poised, watchful— and stirred beside me on the simmering grass.

Let’s get up and go. Trot ahead of me, old friend, and shake off the watery darkness. [End Page 73]

Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch, who taught for eighteen years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, is President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York. Two of his most recent collections of poems are Lay Back the Darkness (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) and Special Orders (Random House, 2008). He is also author of the prose volumes: The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (Harcourt, 2002), Responsive Reading (1999), and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999). His numerous awards include an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, an Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

...

pdf

Share