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Moon Man (audio only)

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Jean Valentine
1934 –
2020

Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.

Jean Valentine
Photo credit: Max Greenstreet

The author of many collections of poetry, Jean Valentine has received such honors as the National Book Award, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

About Jean Valentine

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More by this poet

For love,

you leapt sometimes
you walked away sometimes

that time on the phone you
couldn’t get your breath
I leapt but couldn’t get to you

I caught the brow that bid the dead
I caught the bough that hid

I’m, you know, still here,
tulip, resin, temporary—

Jean Valentine
2016

Friend,

You came in a dream, yesterday
—The first day we met
you showed me your dark workroom
off the kitchen, your books, your notebooks.

Reading our last, knowing-last letters
—the years of our friendship
reading our poems to each other,
I would start breathing again.

Yesterday, in the afternoon,
more than a year since you died,
some words came into the air.
I looked away a second,
and they were gone,
six lines, just passing through.

                                          for Adrienne Rich
Jean Valentine
2013

Ghost Elephants

In the elephant field
tall green ghost elephants
with your cargo of summer leaves

at night I heard you breathing at the window

Don't you ever think I'm not crying
since you're away from me
Don't ever think I went free

At first the goodbye had a lilt to it—
maybe just a couple of months—
but it was a beheading.

Ghost elephant,
reach down,
cross me over—
Jean Valentine
2012

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