Tablature
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Tablature
The smooth alluvial floor of a cavein the riverbank, a lean-to temporaryonly on the geologic scale of the tiltingcliff on a dial, the tacky clayready for the stylus of a bird's foot is cool and quiet in its shade.
Usually it's the present's loud initialsscratching into the walls by hand or collision,pointing the way in its tracks or trailingthe prey of a painter's eye across the hand to the wallwhile the great concavity of sky overhead mirrors a heron mist standing over water,
the earth swimming by in its shade,into range, the long time of light aboutto become its flash we record as star, a life,the bomb start of war— written in water,that fish in the heron's shadow a minute is that feeds millennia, epochs, pages and wading birds. [End Page 779]
Ed Roberson is Distinguished Artist in Residence at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is author of eight books of poetry: The New Wing of the Labyrinth (Singing Horse Press, 2009), City Eclogue (Atelos, 2006), Atmosphere Conditions (Sun & Moon Press, 2000; winner of the 2000 National Poetry Award), Just In / Word of Navigational Challenges: New and Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1998), Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (University of Iowa Press, 1995; winner of the 1994 Iowa Poetry Prize), Lucid Interval as Integral Music (University of Iowa Press, 1995; winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize), Etai-Eken (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), and When Thy King Is a Boy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970). In 2008, he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
