Oeuvre by Noelle Kocot

Toad Hall by Patrick Doughtery

This is a beautiful new poem from Noelle Kocot who will be reading at the upcoming Poems about Nothing event at the Rubin Museum on January 26th. Please click on our Upcoming Events tab above for more information about the reading.

 

Oeuvre

The purring of incidence in the light’s disappearance,
The ground of, how many held by something
Would add dark shades to the grass?  Turning on
The delighted sidewalk, I hear something ramified

By time’s purple flame.  A phone call every night.
A summer I climbed once.  A space between us
In that swelling river of roots.  You are a writer, a poet.
You are midnight when it got back on the road.

The birds scatter their cries in the quiet sheets
Of air.  Well-intended failure, oh this better be good,
Don’t eat too much, or, keep eating, or go out
For another walk.  There is a certain kind of history

The band plays on and on, murder’s patron saint, while
I make my little oeuvre like a bird gathering twigs for a nest.

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Noelle Kocot is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006) and Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009), as well as a discography forthcoming in 2010 from Wave, and a full-length poetry collection, The Bigger World (Wave, 2011).  She has won awards from The American Poetry Review, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Fund for Poetry and The Academy of American Poets, among others.  She lives in N.J.
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