Gradually Then Suddenly
Flowers a dull pink and out of stories.
The clown in the middle of town
dances but only when the streetlights
go blank. Children puff through
the window in a way that makes their faces
an inner god. I have all these chairs
I cannot use. Only the belonging
they beg for. Consider a dead oven
then consider freedom. A heavy kite
could touch Jupiter if Jupiter existed.
Any child could become a swan
song. It doesn’t take long to weather.
Copyright © 2021 by Philip Schaefer. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 18, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this little poem during the height of the pandemic, during a time when poetry felt hard and pointless, yet utterly inevitable. I never want to write about things or events, but rather through them. To pull some sort of energy, whether erratic or numb or both, and let that untethered movement eclipse any part of the writer’s agenda. This poem’s title borrows a Hemingway line from The Sun Also Rises in relation to a character’s bankruptcy. And that is how I felt during the process of this whole thing: humanly bankrupt but grateful to be alive.”
—Philip Schaefer
Philip Schaefer
Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize.