Anne Pierson Wiese

Anne Pierson Wiese Poems

There was the famous photographer, Walker Evans,
who started by photographing old signs and ended
by filling his bathtub with them and washing
...

Down at the end of Baxter Street, where Five Points
slum used to be, just north of Tombs, is a pocket park.
On these summer days the green plane trees' leaves
...

In the Brooklyn Botanic Garden the night
heron is on his branch of his tree, blue
moon curve of his body riding low
...

St. Nicholas Park in Harlem is one of few spots
on the island of Manhattan where you can stand
on terraces of rock untouched since men
...

The twist of the stream was inscrutable.
It was a seemingly run-of-the-mill
stream that flowed for several miles by the side
...

In the morning on my way to the subway
I pass disemboweled trash bags
at the curb, in front of the big building
down the block. You can tell how people dug things out
...

There are many people who spend their nights
on the subway trains. Often one encounters
them on the morning commute, settled in corners,
...

The First warm evening in spring—the evening
on which you no longer feel the air's
temperature and are only aware
...

In Europe you can see cathedrals
from far away. As you drive toward them
across the country they are visible—stony
...

Anne Pierson Wiese Biography

Anne Pierson Wiese (born 1964 Minneapolis, Minnesota ), is an American poet. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of Amherst College and New York University. She works, and lives in Manhattan with her husband. Wiese's work has appeared in: The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Porcupine, Raritan, Atlanta Review, Southwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Rattapallax, Hudson Review, Literary Imagination, Carolina Quarterly, South Carolina Review, West Branch, and Hawai'i Pacific Review.)

The Best Poem Of Anne Pierson Wiese

In The Beginning

There was the famous photographer, Walker Evans,
who started by photographing old signs and ended
by filling his bathtub with them and washing
himself in the kitchen sink. There was the Harlem
man whose pet tiger cub grew so big that first
his family and finally he himself fled
the 12th-floor, three-bedroom apartment in the housing
project, returning every day to fling raw chickens
through a crack in the front door. Love displaces

everything. All over the city the signs peer
from beneath modern facades, fade in the sun and rain
high up on sides of buildings: BEST QUALITY TWINE. Ghosts
on brick, cockeyed atop demolition dumpsters, tin
worn delicate as paper, pale lettered—mint,
red, black: ELEVATOR APARTMENTS AVAILABLE:
INQUIRE ON PREMISES. If you stare at them words
are faces; everyone who ever spelled them out,
ever debated whether to buy twine or rent
an apartment fades up into view wearing shadowy
Homburgs, black veils, parcels in their arms, the winter
air freshening for snow. Or imagine the face
of a tiger waiting behind a thin metal door,
your furniture demolished, your family living
on friends' floors, your neighbors smelling urine and fur
and losing their tolerance, a policeman
rappelling outside your windows with a dart gun.

Imagine a hunger for the invisible world
so deep it must have existed before you were born.

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