Matthew Thorburn

Matthew Thorburn Poems

If we can agree "there's a music for everybody,"
as Eric Salzman says, then yours
is mine. Double reed, narrow bell, dark shine
...

and the green and yellow spill
of trees were what I found here.
The island was very, very
dry that summer and the grass
...

The amazing thing is not
that geese can get sucked
into an Airbus engine
and cause it to conk out
...

I wonder who wound up with it
in the divorce - and notice immediately
how wound looks the same
as wound, a hurt - that tacky
...

A pair of goldfinches huddle
at the feeder. Drab yellow; first
you've seen this year. They peck
...

July afternoon—
Lily's tongue
the color of her snow cone.
...

An Anglo bistro. Sweat-soaked. Six-ish.
"Absolut?" Amstel Light. Midtown and then some,
and me just back from Michigan's sore thumb.
One of the city-slick? I wish. No, nix wish—
...

The one I rode in on. That mud-colored nag.
When he blinks his black eye bigger
than my fist, his eyelid's an upside-down
pocket. And the scrape, the spark of horseshoes
...

One of Max Beckmann's flat black numbers-
just shy of midnight, shiny at the elbows,
on loan tonight to help me fit in here
...

I misread on the UP escalator
at Macy's and things go downhill
from there. Now starchy
as a white shirt, now neat as a pleat
...

This tree keeps falling over. I prop it up,
it falls again. And the rain falls
day after day like a broken wet record.
Here are the birds- tiny, smaller
...

Between the Age of Enlightenment and the age
of thirty, I lost my way. Disappointment
...

That he would go back
after hours to retouch
the ones hanging in the gallery—
he must have had an in
...

Mount Misen, when we made it, was fogged in
up top. Rain would start and stop—
a storm on the way? The promised view
...

The birds break and wheel.
Fall out of, back into, their loose-
weave wave. Define a falling
arc. They fall like dark water
...

Matthew Thorburn Biography

Matthew Thorburn is an American poet. He is the author of three books of poems, Subject to Change (New Issues, 2004), Every Possible Blue (CW Books, 2012) and This Time Tomorrow (Waywiser Press, forthcoming 2013), and a chapbook, Disappears in the Rain (Parlor City, 2009). Thorburn is a native of Michigan. He graduated from the University of Michigan,and The New School with an MFA. He lives in New York City. He works on the business staff of an international law firm. He was one of the founders of Good Foot magazine, co-editing the journal from 2000 to 2004. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and The American Poetry Review, among other journals. He also regularly contributes book reviews to Pleiades.)

The Best Poem Of Matthew Thorburn

To An Oboe

If we can agree "there's a music for everybody,"
as Eric Salzman says, then yours
is mine. Double reed, narrow bell, dark shine

of grenadilla wood from the Mpinga tree,
I'd never confuse you with a clarinet.
Your "penetrating, brilliant tone"—I might

say arch, a touch reedy, though not so high
as a whine—seems at home with a violin, viola
and cello in this Quartet in F Major

by Mozart, though in my Webster's you elbow in
comfortably enough between obnubilate,
"to be cloudy, becloud," and obol, "the ancient

Greek coin or weight equal to 1/6 drachma,"
even if in the illustrative sketch you appear
to be played by Steve Martin. Still I hear you

best in the Peter and the Wolf I heard a dozen
years ago at St. Gerard's, in which you're the duck
who waddles, quacks and too quickly

gets gulped down for lunch by the bandy-legged
wolf skulking about in velvet breeches,
but not quite, not yet, not before

you paddle past once more in the cool dark
waters that flow from B flat below
middle C upwards for over 2 1/2 octaves.

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