David Baker

David Baker is a poet, educator, editor, and literary critic and the author of 12 books of poetry, most recently Swift: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2019), Scavenger Loop (W. W. Norton, 2015), and Never-Ending Birds (W. W. Norton, 2009), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize in 2011, and 6 books of literary criticism, most recently Seek After: On Seven Modern Lyric Poets (SFASU, 2018). He was awarded prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Foundation, the Utah Arts Council, the Society of Midland Authors, and the Ohioana Library Association. Baker lives in Granville, OH, where he serves as Professor of English and the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University. He is the editor of the Kenyon Review. http://www.davidbaker.website

David Baker Poems

Tree Frogs

______________________________________

One starts. The still heat is a blown curtain.

The curtain wavers then—now two of them—

and another from beyond the blue agave.

Soon the whistling, wheet-eet-eet, the many,

so many tree frogs “no bigger than thumbprints,”

coqui eleutherodactylus, the common coqui,

which we’ve never seen but in books, not once.

Now the purring, the rolling coo of

the mourning dove song of the island toads

among the hundred frogs, and crickets, gryllidae,

in late day rising salt background waves,

as, in the bay, the small squall we didn’t see

at first is a gray-bellied cloud in the still

yet azure twilight sky, and the container ship

pulls on through the sheath of mist—

a distant bell among the white cedars.

Can the ending of things ever be heard?

So slowly it crawls with the gross weight

of all our needs, our goods, our ghosts.

Such little things we are, and so much noise.



Never-Ending Birds

____________________________________

That’s us pointing to the clouds. Those are clouds

of birds, now we see, one whole cloud of birds.

There we are pointing out the car windows.

October. Gray-blue-white olio of birds.

Never-ending birds, you called the first time—

years we say it, the three of us, any

two of us, one of those just endearments.

Apt clarities. Kiss on the lips of hope.

I have another house. Now you have two.

That’s us pointing with our delible whorls

into the faraway, the trueborn blue-

white unfeathering cloud of another year.

Another sheet of their never ending.

There’s your mother wetting back your wild curl.

I’m your father. That’s us three, pointing up.

Dear girl. They will not—it’s we who do—end.


Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips is the author of 15 books of poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) and Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other honors include the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he was Chancellor from 2006 to 2012. He is also the author of two books of prose: The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004); and he translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004). Phillips is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis., MO.

Carl Phillips Poems

SKYLARK

You know those days that fairly swell with triumph at having

hit your mark exactly as you’d hoped to—you can feel it—

then that slow understanding that you’ve yourself been hit

also, proof all over again of how akin, in its disorienting effects,

triumph is to nausea?

Nothing’s right, or can be made right, or

that’s for days how it’s felt, between us.

Camouflage,

or foliage? Intention,

or just the way things are?

You’re far, somehow.

And I can’t see far.


SINCE WHEN SHALL

SPEAK OF IT NO MORE

—Clouds like the manes of stallions, the mane alive still

on the stallion’s ghost-body. As if the body had died, I mean,

and the mane forgotten to. Or been weirdly stranded. I’m

no one’s horse. I’m not what waves like a bit of ocean down

and too either side of its brindled neck. I’m not a thing I know.