Aimless Reading: The M's, Part 59 (Jennifer Moxley)

Imagination Verses, a photo by Michael_Kelleher on Flickr.

Moxley, Jennifer
Imagination Verses

I am not sure where I bought this one.

I have a vague recollection of buying it online. I feel like it may have been a part of a purchase that included several books by poets who are more or less my contemporaries. This would have occurred after I'd told myself I was reading too much theory and needed to get back to reading poetry, an event that occurred at least once a semester and resulted in the purchased of five or ten poetry books at a pop.

That said, I also have a memory of having heard Jennifer's name when I still lived in New York, and of having looked for it at St. Mark's Book's, and then of having sat on a rolling step-stool in the back corner between the poetry island and the fiction shelves and reading her preface to the collection. I read the preface but not the poems.

I read the poems much later, after I'd bought the book.

from Imagination Verses

From A Distance I Can See

You have a lovely and familiar gravity,

and like in the apartment of my youthful reveries

each time I walk into you my city-bound Greyhound

rolls through the rain drenched streets,

a lightscape full of traffic and wondrous people

lies ahead, once you've caught view they shall demand

the tapering of all your beautiful fingers,

they shall tell your eyes to stop shooting such glances

for they are blocking your lips from seeming

red as they are, and what of gentle memory,

it frames your face and returns home devastated

to inform me of such boundaries shifting

that in them as in you, my dreams shall rest just dreams,

the rain drenched city of adulthood, vanish in advances.