The Slow Loris
Rent from DeepDyve- The Slow Loris
It's almost motionlessin the rigid twisted shapeof half of a dead tree in its cage and won't let go of any branch it clings to with less or more than onesure hand or doubly sureprehensile foot at a timeand even then it waits until it knows what nothing else on earth knows how to hold or think aboutor will ever understandbefore it moves againso slowly you might think it's done ahead of time what you yourself have done almost as slowly whilewishing to be stillgripping the same branchin the same place as when you hadn't yet begun behind wide open eyes behind a deep black mask(in a night when nothing moved)to dream of running, runningaway from everything. [End Page 45]
David Wagoner has published nineteen books of poems, most recently After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon P). He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991, six yearly prizes from Poetry, two yearly prizes from Prairie Schooner, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007 his play First Class was given forty-three performances at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002, and he is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. He teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop.
