Poetry / Kathy Fagan
:: As far as the eye can see, we say, ::
as far as I can tell— if the eye can see, if the I can tell— our plumage, our plastic, our metals brushed gray as sky, the clouds we wreck through, their resistance a minor disturbance on the wing, a rattling of the shades on the windows, and below. Meanwhile our coughs, our farts, our failure to place our phones in airplane mode, our failure to mute them, to choose correctly a ringtone, a mate, the appropriate footwear. These we need for the making of poems in the space below the aerial realms, our phones our windows now, screens of heaven, fruit of the tree of the new gods, the gone gods dead as our loved ones, the light behind their faces eternal in our eyes. These we need— the bumps, the reek, the tinkling of shot bottles on the carts— for the making of poems. Watch your elbows, your knees, your hearts, your snores, your babies’ cries like the blown scraps of birds below, winter birds and their shadows, the horizon of their flight made vertical in puddles, mirrors of longitude, black ambigrams as the sky’s gray paper folds in half and half again, a diorama of flight then before darkness comes to quell the difference, and trees as I knew them and forever imagine them to be, the trees, their few leaves left shivering.
:: Drought ::
Someone quit practicing the hard notes and you didn’t notice when Storm clouds made mountains then left us flat gone the chive and jasmine scent the silver in the leaves the masterpiece, the archivist said, at rest white cotton gloves making sure and motorbikes wasping beside and past us after having their turn at empire Truth is, I miss it all though it was much too hot already and pain had made it hard to walk Autumn, I thought, will be my birthday present rain will be, peace Okay, I know the limit 3 wishes + 22 times as many candles = not so many wishes left to make A garden hose dropped where someone was trying trees dormant or dead earth like a carnival come and gone the dynamite from Acme or Amazon having blown the place sky-high The dad jokes we were raised on made us believe we’d survive them I once mourned the children I did not have now I mourn those others have children at lessons and the library down the corner, on the ball field the one growing sunflowers tall as the roof at her doorstep the one who never saw a sunflower you, who never saw a door
From the writer
:: Account ::
On a sketch of the Virgin and Child, Michelangelo instructed his young assistant, in shorthand Italian, to Draw faster, acknowledging that life lasts a moment, death—and art—far longer. As an aging, bi, childless poet currently recognizing the limits of my own life and that of our planet, I have immersed myself in the intimate and urgent discovery that growth and decay are the same cycle, and that art and memory, made in the tumultuous rush of these, are the deeply human attempts to outlast them. My seventh collection, The Unbecoming, begins with the command, Run, into a process that is, for me, like all of us, a circle of becoming and unbecoming simultaneously. The poems are, then, memento mori, a loving reminder, a poet’s reckoning with the rewards and losses of age, and with our painfully beautiful little lives “rounded with a sleep.”
Kathy Fagan’s forthcoming collection, The Unbecoming, will be published by W.W. Norton in September 2026. Her sixth book, winner of PSA’s William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022), available in print and audio. Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she is Professor Emerita of The Ohio State University, where she co-founded and directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing.