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 Contents | July/August 2002 More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. |
Bardo
by Michael Collier .....  Hear Michael Collier read this poem (in RealAudio)... dark wide realm where we walk with everyone.Dangerously frail is what his hand was like when he showed up at our house, three or four days after his death and stood at the foot of our bed. Though we had expected him to appear in some form, it was odd, the clarity and precise decrepitude of his condition, and how his hand, frail as it was, lifted me from behind my head, up from the pillow, so that no longer could I claim it was a dream, nor deny that what your father wanted, even with you sleeping next to me, was to kiss me on the lips. There was no refusing his anointing me with what I was meant to bear of him from where he was, present in the world, a document loose from the archives of form—not spectral, not corporeal— in transit, though not between lives or bodies: those lips on mine, then mine on yours.
Michael Collier is the director of the Breadloaf Writers' Conference and a co-director of the creative-writing program at the University of Maryland. His fourth book of poems is The Ledge (2000). Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; July/August 2002; Bardo; Volume 290, No. 1; 122. |
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