April 21, 2010
 
Continuing an April tradition, Huntington News Network is celebrating April -- National Poetry Month -- With a Poem a Day from Knopf: In Our Room by W.S. Di Piero
 

 
Special to Huntingtonnews.net
 
A tactile poem of love from the 1985 volume Early Light by W. S. Di Piero, now most easily found in his selected poems, Chinese Apples.
 
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In Our Room
 
On the strip between the lakes
I look for some trace of you
in everything that moves.
At the tip of its wake, a coot's
bone bill points through
the leaves' sponged-ink shade,
slate feathers splitting the air;
the water quivers, bright
as your bath-drenched hair
shaking off silvered bits.
A tern pulls up, tilting
through the spreading light,
then drops beak and body fast.
Two dark swifts dip past
swamp oaks like brown
twilight in our room, blinds
barring your face, while your lips
closed on some dream sound,
some word I didn't catch,
a wood-duck's straight-seamed wedge,
a cowbird shuddering from
the lake on loose bent wings.

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Excerpt from CHINESE APPLES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. Copyright © 2007 by W.S. Di Piero. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
 
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