Paul Hoover
The Windows (Speech-lit Islands)
We invited the acclaimed author Paul Hoover, alumnus of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to contribute a poem for Packingtown Review's critical response contest. He graciously offered "The Windows (Speech-lit Islands)." We present the poem here online along with the essay "Hoover's Eternal Moments" by Deborah DeNicola, the winner of the Packingtown Review Prize for Critical Response.
as
if for the first time
you recognize the grass
its
greenness uncanny
in
trying to be green
as if for the first time
you open a letter
that
had fallen
through
the door
its
message unique to you
had
you been
as
perhaps you seemed
the
neighbor
the
one whose name was yours
who
finally joined the army
had you in fact a
country
a
life to give
wife
and family
as if for a while
you could read the signs
remembered to unlearn
how the wind feels
exactly
going
up your spine
sensed the wheat sinking
into the ground nearby
the
whiteness of milk
its
mystical skirt uplifted
miss meat and miss gravy
as if the language
were smudged with words
speech-lit
islands
that
don't submerge in meaning
as
if light itself
were
never in doubt
on
the question
of
transcendence
bees sing bells ring
in the ear's black window
you whisper to the glass
its past in sand
step back please
a sentence is passing
someone's calling
someone's raining
door's creaking contradictions
what bride is not disheveled
by all the world's scissors
make-shape shiftings
been a long time
since you wrote yourself in stone
auto-lithographic
[I] seems to be alone
[I] suffers in a crowd
but not a yellow room
in not a yellow town
everyone's on loan
but someone here knows
why nimble people cry
a bullet makes you die
and then there's you
absent sometimes laughing
as if at last
there is no non-journey
across the whole word
what are you thinking
conjured of a god
pears you'll never taste
lines not written
what you know you are
you'll never be again
Contributor's Notes
's most recent poetry books are Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005) and Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006). With Nguyen Do, he has edited and translated the anthology Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, January 2008) and, with Maxine Chernoff, Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn, Fall 2008).
