Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, WHAT KIND OF MAN, by IRA SADOFF


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

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First Line: What kind of man hides in the duck blinds?


What kind of man hides in the duck blinds?
The days of description are over.
The days of It was April so Everyone Felt Hopeful,
where you could find in the swaying willow

a precise match for your own foggy sentiments.
She tightened her grip on the hospital bed
because giving up meant subscribing to heaven
when the earth seemed all thistle and pod

and digging up the flower beds. Don't hunt down
a pattern here. Don't think the man
at the bus stop wielding a crowbar stands for
a shiver when the sun disappears at four o'clock.

I'm not obliquely building a parallel, making a case.I won't put sepia around
it, walking the black labs
in the reeds while the quail fans its wings
like a deck of cards. I'd want Mozart there, Wolfgang

with the hysterical cackle of the child genius.
To see how he'd perform among the amorphous,
inchoate, obscure scores of the century,
when surprises are loading shells into cartridges,

when what I thought was starlight was chipped porcelain,
where John caught cancer, where Julie read me
her favorite story, where by accident suggested fortuitous
and calamity, where Pakistan set fire to India

or vice versa. What kind of man hides in the duck blinds
all afternoon, talking to himself, making animal sounds?


First Published in The Kenyon Review, Volume 24 #1 (Winter 2002).
www.kenyonreview.org/roth






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