Peter Kane Dufault

Peter Kane Dufault Poems

Peter Kane Dufault Biography

Peter Kane Dufault (April 22, 1923 – April 20, 2013) was an American poet. He was born in New Jersey. He has been writing poetry for almost sixty years. Raised in New York, he graduated from Harvard University and served as a bomber pilot during World War II. In 1968 he ran for Congress in Columbia County, New York on the Liberal Party's anti-war platform. He has been variously employed as a tree-surgeon, journalist, teacher, house-painter, and pollster; he has twice been poet-in-residence at the Cheltenham Festival. He is well known as fiddler, banjo-player, and dance-caller. His poems have appeared in many magazines and journals including The New Yorker, London Magazine and Poetry. His poetry was also included in the Norton Anthology of Poetry in the 1996 Edition. He was raised in Mamaroneck New York and from 1960 until his death he lived and wrote in Hillsdale, New York. On June 4, 2010, the documentary film, What I Meant to Tell You: An American Poet’s State of the Union, had its world premiere at the Berkshire International Film Festival in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He died two days short of his 90th birthday in 2013 at his home in Hillsdale, New York.)

The Best Poem Of Peter Kane Dufault

Burden

I called you because I could not stand alone
looking north to that skyline-
tree globed with its yellow apples
balancing like a fountain of planets
in the bright light and the blue air.

And because on the way there
I looked at a smooth cirque
the brook had worn in a stone;
and nothing as soft as water
could, by taking care,
have so pestled and polished
that granite mortar; only
by a thousand years of indifference,
of aiming elsewhere.

I wish we might do - or no,
look back and find we had done -
some un-advertized thing,
overwhelming and un-self-aware
as water streamlining a stone, or a tree's
kindling in an empty meadow
its casual Hesperides.

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