Poem of the Week | September 22, 2014

This week we feature a new poem by Ann Keniston. Keniston is the author of the poetry collection, The Caution of Human Gestures, and a chapbook, November Wasps: Elegies, as well as coeditor of The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology. Her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Interim, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is also a scholar of contemporary American poetry and associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She lives in Reno with her husband and two sons.
 
Author’s note:

I first drafted this poem after a long period of not writing, which may be why it is so crowded with images and emotions, as well as details from actual dreams. In revision, I tried to clarify and connect its parts—the dream’s two scenes, the story about the catatonic girl I read about a long time ago in the Boston Globe, the references to birds, and the father’s actual situation—but I confess that the connection between them still feels somewhat unclear to me. I suppose the poem in fact is about this failure of connection. Maybe this is why it feels so sad to me: the poem (and I, as its creator) keep getting to the verge of expressing something definitive, then fall back from it. Or perhaps the poem is in fact a kind of elegy, for many things at once. The final sentence describes what I was watching as I wrote the poem. The leaves of the sycamore in my back yard really do all seem to fall off in a single day in November, and both scrub and Stellar jays coexist (but also bicker) there.