#joyce sutphen

[apoemaday]

Naming the Stars

by Joyce Sutphen

This present tragedy will eventually turn into myth, and in the mist of that later telling the bell tolling now will be a symbol, or, at least, a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those loose changes, the rearrangement of hearts, just parts of old lives patched together, gathered into a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see the outline there: her fingertips touching his, the faint fusion of two bodies breaking into light.

[dabiconcordia]

November, 1967 Dr. Zhivago was playing at the Paramount Theater in St. Cloud. That afternoon, we went into Russia, 

and when we came out, the snow was falling, the same snow that fell in Moscow.

The sky had turned black velvet. We'd been through the Revolution and the frozen winters.

In the Chevy, we waited for the heater to melt the ice on the windshield, clapping our hands to keep warm.

On the highway, these two things: a song from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and that semi-truck careening by.

Now I travel through the dark without you and sometimes I turn up the radio, hopeful the way you were, no matter what. by Joyce Sutphen

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Sometimes, with unsought grace, it is a lovely poem that enlivens heart and spirit. Dr. Zhivago was playing at the Paramount Theater in St. Cloud. That afternoon, we went into Russia, and when we came out, the snow was falling—the same snow that fell in Moscow. The sky had turned black velvet. We’d been through the Revolution and the frozen winters. In the Chevy, we waited for the heater to melt ice on the windshield, clapping our hands to keep warm. On the highway, these two things: a song from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and that semi-truck careening by. Now I travel through the dark without you and sometimes I turn up the radio, hopeful the way you were, no matter what. “November, 1967” by Joyce Sutphen from First Words. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2010 Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac and “Reckonings”

[via “Alive On All Channels”]

[nomorechoirs]

“Say It” by Joyce Sutphen

[dreamofmourning]

[poem-today]

A poem by Joyce Sutphen

My Luck

When I was five, my father, who loved me, ran me over with a medium-sized farm tractor.

I was lucky though; I tripped and slipped into a small depression, which caused the wheels to tread

lightly on my leg, which had already been broken (when I was three) by a big dog, who liked to play rough,

and when I was nine, I fell from the second-floor balcony onto the cement by the back steps,

and as I went down I saw my life go by and thought: “This is exactly how Wiley Coyote feels, every time!”

Luckily, I mostly landed on my feet, and only had to go on crutches for a few months in the fifth grade—

and shortly after that, my father, against his better judgment, bought the horse I’d wanted for so long.

All the rest of my luck has to do with highways and ice—things that could have happened, but didn’t.

Joyce Sutphen

More poems by Joyce Sutphen are available on the Poetry Foundation site.

More poems by Joyce Sutphen are available on the Voetica site.

More poems by Joyce Sutphen are available on the Writers Almanac site.

[april-is]

April 14, 2024: The Wordsworth Effect, Joyce Sutphen

The Wordsworth Effect Joyce Sutphen

Is when you return to a place and it's not nearly as amazing as you once thought it was,

or when you remember how you felt about something (or someone) but you know you'll never feel that way again.

It's when you notice someone has turned down the volume, and you realize it was you; when you have the

suspicion that you've met the enemy and you are it, or when you get your best ideas from your sister's journal.

Is also-to be fair-the thing that enables you to walk for miles and miles chanting to yourself in iambic pentameter

and to travel through Europe with only a clean shirt, a change of underwear, a notebook and a pen.

And yes: is when you stretch out on your couch and summon up ten thousand daffodils, all dancing in the breeze.

--

Also: Dorothy Wordsworth, Jennifer Chang

Another by Joyce Sutphen: Living in the Body

Today in:

2023: Spring Poem, Colleen O’Connor 2022: Red, Mary Ruefle 2021: Bathing, Allison Seay 2020: A Small Moment, Cornelius Eady 2019: You Meet Someone and Later You Meet Their Dancing and You Have to Start Again, David Welch 2018: Henry Clay’s Mouth, Thomas Lux 2017: When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me, Tracy K. Smith 2016: Eve Recollecting the Garden, Grace Bauer 2015: from I Love A Broad Margin To My Life, Maxine Hong Kingston 2014: Gift, Czeslaw Milosz 2013: This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin 2012: We Did Not Make Ourselves, Michael Dickman 2011: Happiness (3), Jean Valentine 2010: When I Think, Jeanne Marie Beaumont 2009: The Poem, Franz Wright 2008: Morning Poem, Robin Becker 2007: Supple Cord, Naomi Shihab Nye 2006: Wish For a Young Wife, Theodore Roethke 2005: The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy, Jeffrey McDaniel

[contremineur]

Dr. Zhivago was playing at the Paramount Theater in St. Cloud. That afternoon, we went into Russia, and when we came out, the snow was falling—the same snow that fell in Moscow. The sky had turned black velvet. We’d been through the Revolution and the frozen winters. In the Chevy, we waited for the heater to melt ice on the windshield, clapping our hands to keep warm. On the highway, these two things: a song from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and that semi-truck careening by. Now I travel through the dark without you and sometimes I turn up the radio, hopeful the way you were, no matter what.

Joyce Sutphen, November, 1967 (in ‘First Words’, Red Dragonfly Press 2010)