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

  • Blank Journal, and: The Lost Hour, and: Winter on the Island
  • Floyd Skloot (bio)

Blank Journal

On Memorial Day, 1992, I bought this journal whose pages remain blank except for the date and coffee-stained flyleaf. Tucked between pages one and two, the receipt tells me exactly where I stood when I first knew I was in love with you: corner of Fourth and Taylor, just past noon. I remember the weather was so good for late May that I walked to the river and kept hearing the phrase I’ll see her soon like a song playing over and over in my mind. What a perfect first entry [End Page 66] for the new journal, I thought. But instead of going back to buy an emergency pen at the store, I turned toward home, my head filled with the melody of seeing you soon.

The Lost Hour

Time did not stop. I remember talking with the young doctor about his New York years, then my clean bowels, and he was walking away, a nurse swabbing where veins fork in my hand, my wife leaning over to kiss my lips, my daughter’s voice on the cell phone laughing. No sense of a moment missed, an hour gone, only knowing all was well where before there was concern since time could be catching up to me—a man of sixty—in the form of secret growth, past appetites, or an inheritance both latent and malign. But they all say I’m safe for now, should rise again when I can. [End Page 67]

Winter on the Island

In late December nothing could keep us from walking the shoreline to land’s end. Storm by storm we saw high summer sands flattening until the old year died in a surge of surf. By then swash stained the beach gray as the place where sky and rising sea came together. This was the turning world as far as we knew it, children learning faith in longshore drift, the quiet work of currents beneath all that dark churn and spume.

Floyd Skloot

Floyd Skloot has three forthcoming books. They are his Selected Poems: 1970–2005 (Tupelo), the new collection of poems The Snow’s Music (Louisiana State UP), and his memoir The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life (U of Nebraska P). He lives in Portland, Oregon.

...

pdf

Share