Chris Forhan

Rating: 4.33
Rating: 4.33

Chris Forhan Poems

So this is what it's like when love
leaves, and one is disappointed
that the body and mind continue to exist,
...

Never put your personal spoon in the common jelly bowl.
Spread your napkin upon your lap. Do not grasp.
Eat what meat your fork can get to; the rest of the lobster must be given
...

The night sky's a black stretch limo, boss in the back
behind tinted glass. You could say that.

Down here's a dungeon, up there's the glittering
ring of keys in the sentry's fist. The self
...

She reads by the light of a guttering candle
and likes the feel of each page's gilt edge
as she lifts it slightly at the corner, readying
...

my father is having to leave the house
with delicacy, easing the dead bolt open
in the dark. The house exhales him.
I'm thinking of a driving lay-up, of a girl
...

Those overtime nights in the ice factory, eyeing gauges, greasing gears: that's one thing. And the hours of clarinet lessons.
All that rain that blathered on the patio, leaves
...

Night again, and I'm not impressed:
the blurred cedar, blowzy in her black dress,
the bat's manic acrobatics -- he tries too hard --
the hooligan raccoon routing in the brush,
...

Straight A's on arithmetic quizzes, your cheek gets ground
into the concrete down here, Sir. Thank You

for sending only Your smallest monsters to find me
and Your giant silence, thank You for that, within it
...

Chris Forhan Biography

Chris Forhan grew up in Seattle, Washington. He earned an MA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. He is the author of Forgive Us Our Happiness (1999), co-winner of the Bakeless Literary Publication Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars (2003), winner of the Samuel Morse French Poetry Prize; and Black Leapt In (2009), chosen by poet Phillis Levin for the Barrow Street Press Book Prize. Publishers Weekly noted that in Forgive Us Our Happiness Forhan’s “happiness is mediated by wry glances at the mythic . . . and the demotic.” Often elegiac, the poems in Black Leapt In address a son’s early loss of his father, and the strange yet familiar experience of coming of age. Lawrence Raab commented that the poems in Black Leapt In “have in them something of Theodore Roethke’s excitement at being alive in the physical world—how much there is to see!—as well as Roethke’s certainty of the darkness threaded all through that world.” Forhan’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2008, AGNI online, and the Paris Review. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.)

The Best Poem Of Chris Forhan

Gouge, Adze, Rasp, Hammer

So this is what it's like when love
leaves, and one is disappointed
that the body and mind continue to exist,

exacting payment from each other,
engaging in stale rituals of desire,
and it would seem the best use of one's time

is not to stand for hours outside
her darkened house, drenched and chilled,
blinking into the slanting rain.

So this is what it's like to have to
practice amiability and learn
to say the orchard looks grand this evening

as the sun slips behind scumbled clouds
and the pears, mellowed to a golden-green,
glow like flames among the boughs.

It is now one claims there is comfort
in the constancy of nature, in the wind's way
of snatching dogwood blossoms from their branches,

scattering them in the dirt, in the slug's
sure, slow arrival to nowhere.
It is now one makes a show of praise

for the lilac that strains so hard to win
attention to its sweet inscrutability,
when one admires instead the lowly

gouge, adze, rasp, hammer--
fire-forged, blunt-syllabled things,
unthought-of until a need exists:

a groove chiseled to a fixed width,
a roof sloped just so. It is now
one knows what it is to envy

the rivet, wrench, vise -- whatever
works unburdened by memory and sight,
while high above the damp fields

flocks of swallows roil and dip,
and streams churn, thick with leaping salmon,
and the bee advances on the rose.

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