Elizabeth Spires
Elizabeth Spires Poems
My name in the black air, called out in the early morning.
A premonition dreamed: waking, I beheld a future of mourning.
...
The world bends us to its purpose.
In the public gardens, we found
a "gazing globe" balanced
on a waist-high pedestal,
...
The world changed.
Books disappeared, replaced
by glowing screens.
Poems that mattered once
...
The island's dark tonight.
The radio crackles with static, news
of a blackout, the voice
coming through first loud, then soft,
...
I found a white stone on the beach
inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.
All night I'd slept in fits and starts,
my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.
...
In a world of souls, I set out to find them.
They who first must find each other,
be each other's fate.
...
Here, in the half-dark of the sauna,
the bodies of the women glisten ...
Naked, disproportionate, lush,
hung and burdened with flesh, they open slowly,
...
It rains and it keeps
raining, and there is
no sound except the sound
of the rain falling,
...
Meeting old friends after a long time, we see
with surprise how they have changed, and must imagine,
despite the mirror's lies, that change is upon us, too.
...
Swirl and smash of waves against the legs
and crossgirders of the pier, I have come to Brighton,
come as the fathers of our fathers came,
to see the past's Peep Show.
...
Along Ocean Highway, apartments rise up
to ten and twenty stories,
white, hallucinatory, defying the shifting sand,
the storm moving in off the Atlantic
...
From flowering gnarled trees
they come, weighing down
the branches, dropping
with a soft sound onto
...
I watch you traverse the long green table
your trail slick & shiny then pluck you up
& hold you wet & glistening in my open hand
...
In heaven it is always autumn. The leaves are always near
to falling there but never fall, and pairs of souls out walking
heaven's paths no longer feel the weight of years upon them.
Safe in heaven's calm, they take each other's arm,
...
My life slows and deepens.
I am thirty-eight, neither here nor there.
It is a morning in July, hot and clear.
...
I count the rays of the jellyfish:
twelve in this one, like a clock to tell time by,
thirteen in the next, time gone awry.
...
Dear Friend, "Called away" from my country,
I square the egg and put it in a letter
that all may read, gilding each word a little
so that touched, it yields to a secret
...
A featherweight letter drops through the mailslot
addressed to me. Pale blue, it has followed me
from city to city, travelling oceans and continents,
to arrive thirty years late. The writing is illegible.
...
Bright sphere, I have watched you dreaming,
your face a wordless whorl, an inward-folding flower
whose petals spiral round a dream of milk and hunger,
a fear of falling farther than outstretched arms
...
Elizabeth Spires Biography
Elizabeth Spires (born 1952 Lancaster, Ohio) is an American poet. She was raised in Circleville. She graduated from Vassar College and Johns Hopkins University. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The New Criterion, The Paris Review, and many other literary magazines and anthologies, She lives in Baltimore with her husband and her daughter, a graduate of Columbia University, and is a professor of English at Goucher College where she holds a Chair for Distinguished Achievement.)
The Best Poem Of Elizabeth Spires
Sims: The Game
In some ways it's Life Real Life
in some ways Yes in some ways No
You design the people they can be
outgoing nice playful active neat
but you can't make them be everything
if they are neat they will clean up after themselves
(Charisma is when they talk to themselves
in front of a mirror)
Adults never get older & old people can do
anything young people can do
Adults don't have to have jobs they can cheat:
push the rose bud & money appears
Job objects like pizza ovens earn you money
or you can be an extra in a movie a soldier
a doctor an astronaut a human guinea pig
Children get older slowly every day they get a report card
children can live in the house without adults
(a family is anyone who lives in the house with you)
Everyone gets skill points:
for chess painting playing the piano
gardening cooking swimming mechanics
(when you get points a circle above your head
fills up with blue)
& there are goals: not to run out of money not to die
& to buy more stuff for the house
(like a pool table or an Easy Double Sleeper Bed)
Adults can get married but it's hard to get married
You tell them to propose but they can't make the decision
on an empty stomach or they've just eaten
& are too tired
To have a Baby click Yes or No & a baby carriage
rolls up
Everyone has to eat sleep go to the bathroom etc.
if they live alone & don't have friends
they get depressed & begin waving their arms
If you give them Free Will you don't have to
keep track of them
but it's strange what they'll do:
once a player fell asleep under the stairs standing up
& sometimes they go into a bedroom that isn't theirs
& sleep in the wrong bed then you have to tell them:
Wake up! That is not your bed!
If they are mad they stomp on each other or put each other
in wrestling holds but no one gets hurt
There are different ways to die:
you can drown in the pool if you swim laps for 24 hours
(the Disaster Family all drowned in the pool
except the little girl who kept going
to school after they died she was perfect)
& the stove or fireplace or grill
can set the house on fire:
once there was a fire in the kitchen
eight people rushed in
yelling Fire! Fire! & blocked the door
so the firemen couldn't get through
(after that everyone had to study cooking
now there are less accidents)
If you have Free Will you can starve or drown yourself
then you wander around as a ghost
until another player agrees to resurrect you
In some ways it's Life Real Life
in some ways Yes in some ways No
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4/25/2024 9:22:42 PM # 1.0.0.1119
