Alternate Self-Portrait
One day
I will drift
into darkness
and know it
perhaps
the way a son
recognizes a mother
after he has returned
from many years
of travel
understanding
the new distance
is neither
beginning nor
end
only stillness
Copyright © 2015 by Dean Rader. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 30, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“There are a lot of self-portraits or faux self-portraits in my forthcoming book, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, as the title might suggest. In this poem, I had been thinking about unusual self-portraits, in particular portraits at the moment of death (rare) as opposed to those at the moment of birth (legion). And I began wondering if death were not something new but later something intimately known; the comfortable welcoming place we were before we were born.”
—Dean Rader
Dean Rader
Dean Rader is the author of Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) and Suture (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), collaborative sonnets written with Simone Muench. He teaches at the University of San Francisco, and lives in San Francisco