Murphy Writing of Stockton University Presents
This entry is part of Getaway Reads, an e-mail series curated by Kendal Lambert that features the writing of the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway faculty.
Backyard Swing Set
Thomas Lux
by Thomas Lux
Splayed, swayback, cheap pipe
playground: a swing, a slide, some rings
maybe—we love our babies
and a tire hanging from a branch
won’t do. For one summer
it shines—red, the chains of silver,
and beside it the blue plastic pool.
First winter out it goes to rust.
I love America’s backyards,
seen from highways, or when
you’re lost and looking
hard at houses, numbers.
The above, plus a washed-out willow,
starveling hedge, tool shed
a dozen times dented,
and greasy streak
against the garage where a barbeque
went berserk. A Chevy engine block
never hauled away
or the classic Olds on chocks….
Beneath the blue-grey humps of snow
are pieces of a summer, a past
Mom said to pick up,
but they weren’t. Nobody’s home, all
across America, nobody’s home now.
Brother or Sister is, in fact, on Guam,
or working nightshift at the box factory,
or one is married and at this moment
wiping milk-rings from a kitchen table.
And Mom, Mom is gone,
and the ash on Father’s cigarette grows so long
it begins to chasm and bend.
© Thomas Lux. Originally published in New and Selected Poems 1975-1995.
Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy
by Thomas Lux
For some semitropical reason
when the rains fall
relentlessly they fall
into swimming pools, these otherwise
bright and scary
arachnids. They can swim
a little, but not for long
and they can’t climb the ladder out.
They usually drown—but
if you want their favor,
if you believe there is justice,
a reward for not loving
the death of ugly
and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,
rats) creatures, if
you believe these things, then
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.
And in the morning
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors
and escort them
back to the bush, and know,
be assured that at least these saved,
as individuals, would not turn up
again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld
of your socks, and that even—
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams—
they may tell the others
in a sign language
four times as subtle
and complicated as man’s
that you are good,
that you love them,
that you would save them again.
© Thomas Lux. Originally published in New and Selected Poems 1975-1995 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997)
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The Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway and Murphy Writing are programs of Stockton University.
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Thomas Lux is Bourne Professor of Poetry at The Georgia Institute of Technology. He directs the McEver Visiting Writers Program and Poetry@Tech. He has published over a dozen books of poetry; his most recent is Selected Poems 1982-2012 (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2014). His forthcoming books are To the Left of Time (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), and an edited volume, Selected Poems of Bill Knott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also received the Kingsley Tufts Award for his book, Split Horizon.
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Want to study with Thomas Lux? Thomas will be leading two special feedback sessions of Advanced Poetry Writing at the 2016 Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway.
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