Clouds

 

East is all wall, predawn cloudbank elevating treeline’s

blackness ten degrees. Was that a real world or did

you just make it up yourself? Reading by lantern light

on the Olympic Peninsula over forty years ago by way of poem’s

opening. What would it mean to die joined at the head

with the ephemerata of such light, clouds and fog this side

of dawn’s bright opening onto a green that encompasses whatever I

find through its agency. Who am I this time? Cars on canted curve,

sun blasting through pickup cab, schoolbus windows, tiny heads

locked in sharpness shuttering past (as though I wouldn’t know her

anywhere, staccato silhouette, her passing presence, prone to such…

as though she lies in me, wakes as memory rises above the horizon

in the east. Who are the dead to talk? What might they say? Clouds

rubbed into treeline by fog, gray, then white, thinly drawn.

 

In 2012 University of New Orleans Press published the selected poems (Sheer Indefinite: Selected Poems 1991-2011, 200 pgs) in their Contemporary Poetry Series. Skip Fox has written four other books (126-272 pgs.) by presseslike Ahadada and Potes & Poets, as well as four chapbooks (two letterpress).

He has been published in such little magazines and e-magazines as o.blek: A Journal of Language Arts, Talisman, House Organ, Texture, New Orleans Review, Exquisite Corpse, Hambone, lower limit speech, Pavement Saw, Prosodia, Blackbox, eratio, Tarpaulin Sky, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Culture Vulture, There, EOACH, Little Red Leaves, etc.

Skip teaches modern and contemporary American poetry and creative writing at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He has also published a lengthy annotated secondary bibliography on Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan with G.K. Hall.