Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, POEM - UNFINISHED POEM, by THOMAS MCGRATH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

POEM - UNFINISHED POEM, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: What a way to spend the golden years, tomasito
Last Line: To hell with that word, tomasito! Let's go out in the sun!
Subject(s): Fathers; Poetry & Poets; Sons; Writer's Block; Writing & Writers


What a way to spend the golden years, Tomasito!
Jackassing around in all weather, pickheaded and spade handed,
(Never closer to ten-strike than the Mother-in-Law Lode!)
Through deserts temporal and spiritual where every badlands bonanza
Turns into borrasca . . . and always trying to find the handle
For the Malpais: the name for the As-Yet-Undiscovered Country,
And find the Logos and Lost Dutchman of the One and Ore-bearing Word . . .
Many cold camps on the trail of live language, little cheechaco,
And my only companion a burro who brays like a bourgeois poet!

A whole week wasted: packing through one black pass!
And another morning gone crossing the rotten talus
To con the quartz of a cliff-face, then over the ridge
And into a new river-system -- the rock barren and rotten,
Snow on the breakneck slope and ice right down to the water . . .

And all in the vain search for a single word, and one
That's probably full of fool's gold at that!
Damn crazy way to spend so much of a life --
To hell with that word, Tomasito! Let's go out in the sun!


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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