your ear pressed to the asphalt
listening for further instructions

finally the hour has come
it is time for the long journey
I say to my wife and child a last farewell

and click the blue button
my face appears across from my face
it is the day we will virtually discuss

the unpredictable resolutions I am sure
obscurely will decide my fate
the ostensible chair begins to speak

thank you for your electrons
I hope you are well in these days   
or at least surviving

Yesterday I kicked a tree
a walnut fell in a grave
nobody got hurt

it’s June
the February
of summer

I heard a little cough
in the room, and turned
but no one was there

My neighbors, my remnants, in what have you chosen 
to bury your heads? Shadow said one mote 
in an auditorium after a lecture.

Today a ladybug flew through my window. I was reading 
about the snowy plumage of the Willow Ptarmigan 
and the song of the Nashville Warbler.

Hello everyone, hello you. Here we are under 
this sky. Where were you Tuesday? I was at the El Rancho 
Motel in Gallup.

Right now in the rest area it’s sunny and cold. Someone 
is taking a picture of the vending machine. I have 
never been sad for appropriate reasons.

“In rearranging these lines, I wasn’t writing poems exactly, just trying to connect things from different times.”

Matthew Zapruder shares the process through which a poem refines itself.

An original poem by Matthew Zapruder for W. S. Merwin, written, in part, at his home in Hawaii

Most of us assumed that “Dome of the Hidden Pavilion” was James Tate’s final book. But it turned out there were more poems.

If the poem gives you that “drifting experience,” it is doing what it is supposed to do. 

If the poem gives you that “drifting experience,” it is doing what it is supposed to do.