Sherod Santos
Sherod Santos Poems
Pushing off on her back out
Into the fishpond's cold
Archaic glitter, my naked wife
Could not have guessed how
...
The window in mid-summer raised, and where
the screen intersects with the frame, a web of circular
tensile silks radiating outward from the central lair
...
In the American schoolyard
where we lunged headfirst
onto the rocky ground scrab-
bling for a ball
...
24.
In the last photograph of my sister, she is
sprawling in the shade, or what shade's left,
on the converted toolshed's whitewashed steps.
...
An emerald dungeon's blacklight glow
glimmered in the deeper reaches
where my son and I could hear the slub
of water riddling through the muck.
...
Having slept in a turnout in the backseat
of her car, she awoke before dawn, shivering,
hungover, unsure of where she was.
...
—for Logan and Renée Jenkins
Unlike almost everything
Else just surviving here
In summer, poison flowers
...
The day of my mother's funeral I spend clearing out
her overgrown flower beds, down on my knees
in the leaf rot, nut shells, tiny grains of sandlot sand
spilling from the runoff gullies. The hot work was to see
...
I.
Did he think that disguise would fool me? Gathering about
His balding head those filthy rags, poor-mouthing
His way beside my fire, then gazing into the looking glass
...
Sherod Santos Biography
Sherod Santos (born September 9, 1948 in Greenville, South Carolina) is an American poet, essayist and professor. His most recent poetry collection is forthcoming, The Intricated Soul: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2010). His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Antioch Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review, and Parnassus. His many honors and awards include Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts and Ingram Merrill fellowships, and Pushcart prizes. His book, The Pilot Star Elegies (W.W. Norton, 2000), was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award; and from 1990 to 1997, Santos served as external examiner and poet-in-residence at the Poets' House in Portmuck, Northern Ireland, and in 1999 he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Santos was born in South Carolina and graduated from San Diego State University with a B.A. and M.A., and studied at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Utah. He is a professor of English at the University of Missouri.)
The Best Poem Of Sherod Santos
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Pushing off on her back out
Into the fishpond's cold
Archaic glitter, my naked wife
Could not have guessed how
High she rode into the noon
Sky, a brightened polestar
Gliding out between nothing
And nothing, between a sun-
Lit vacancy and its ancient,
Reflected, weightless
Hour unrippling back
From the sedges. The just-
Cut grasses fumed around her
Like gasoline, a few
Spent bees dozed above
The compost, and in my arms
The steady thrum of the mower
Carried on, though I'd
Shut it off to sit down
And watch: but so fond of her,
The water parted to take
Her back from that aimless
Sky, where light-
Headed and slippery as a star
She turtled under the still
Simmering Indian summer
To startle the sunfish
At the margins—then punctured
Back with a blow-frog's gasp,
An amazed stranger
Conjured into the world
By a willow shadow
Spread out on the grass
Like an extravagant Old
World gesture no
One believes in anymore.
On that stalled shore she climbed
Back out among the cool
And slightly washed-
Out leaves to towel off,
Put on her clothes, and shake
Her hair out in no time
Which slips off into the past,
Or future, into nothing
But the pure unburnished hum-
Drum of that moment, that place,
From which we turned away
Eventually and went back to work.
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