Working on poems at the dock
and boat launch at Tivoli Bays,
I realize rather that I am living
in a poem, not narrating one
of sailors’ yarns from Sweden.
Solitary bees the size of plums
fly by on their way to spurge,
there’s a canoe under decking
in the lily pads and frogspawn
is waterlogged from flash floods
that have taken out our power.
The wall of Manitou surges up
across the Hudson as if to point
a way to push the mind to action.
—
William Allen has previously published poetry books with New York University and Persea Presses (The Man on the Moon, 1987), Xenos Press (Sevastopol: On Photographs of War, 1997), Clay Street Press (North Passage, 2018), and Spuyten Duivil Press (The Largest Glue Factory in the World, 2024). He was awarded a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship with residencies at Yaddo, Breadloaf and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
