Hugh Steinberg

Hugh Steinberg Poems

Hugh Steinberg Biography

Hugh Steinberg's poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in Crowd, VeRT, Volt, Spork, Slope, Fence, No Tell Motel, and Forklift, Ohio. He is the author of two chapbooks, In the Attic of the House of the Dead (Chax Press, 2000) and While the Thunder Lasted I Felt Like God (Light & Dust, 1997). He received an MFA from the University of Arizona and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. A recipient of an NEA creative writing fellowship in poetry, Steinberg teaches at the California College of the Arts and is the editor of Freehand, a journal devoted to handwritten work. He lives in Berkeley)

The Best Poem Of Hugh Steinberg

Diary

I want to be
intricate inside
you I want to open
the little book
of you. That library
you live in, I
check you out.
Rustdark readings
by the starfilled lake:
all here, every page
no one was reading.
I like to read,
even the hard stories,
the wrong words, I hold them
in my mouth, the odd words
we use for want, that
no one knows
how to say, not even
you, a key gets
turned. We were locked,
between the stale earth and
the sky, the key turns the lock
between you and
you, the key turns the ground,
the ground is set each successive
hour of the day,
the book is opened, goes dark
as night sinks down, down into
the well of the heart:
we have lost nothing,
nothing is lost.

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