Song over Song for My Father
- Song over Song for My Father
Poetry, Paul Nemser, Song Over Song for My Father, animals, breathing, breath, air, flying, birds
Gotta go. Your tongue’s all slurs. The johnnie’s a page of piss. Lips cracking up. Hum setting fires. Behold, letters fly, and only the parchment burns. Fingers flutter. A tumult of wrens returns. Chitters drown the radio jazz. You ask me to bend your knees. You tap slower than slow behind the beat. A painted tent folds up into your eyes. The animals no longer need the air, you say, as I am breathing there and start a prayer too late. [End Page 225]
paul nemser’s s book Taurus won the New American Poetry Prize, and his chapbook of prose poems Tales of the Tetragrammaton was published in 2014. His poems have appeared in magazines such as AGNI, Blackbird, Columbia, Fulcrum, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly. Work is forthcoming in London Review of Books and Plume. He co-translated two books of Ukrainian poetry: Antonych, Square of Angels and Drach, Orchard Lamps, which won a PEN prize.
