those old poems that friends
wrote on bar napkins
about women in bars or about fathers
they described as stern and distant
but who were probably just busy
with their own disappointments
poetry could be about something
the dance or wandering lonely as a cloud
dead precedents or sparrows along a hedgerow
your uncle with the glass eye
even though he never had one
your aunt who gave the bad piano lessons
which is why you never learned did you
now you feel only
that you’d like a little snack
too close to bedtime
or that the glow from the last light
in the afternoon at quarter after four
means that another day has passed
without a lot of change
in weather you can point to
and that it’s winter again like yesterday
true there’s leftover carryout in the fridge
an earlier portion of which
interested not even the dog
he sleeps still in his cozy bed
near the unlit fireplace the bed
which smells so much like him to him
that he sometimes thinks he’s part of it
or so it seems to you
Richard Terrill is a former student and instructor at UW-Eau Claire. He is the winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry and the Associated Writing Programs Award for nonfiction. His new book is What Falls Away Is Always: Poems & Conversations from Holy Cow! Press. The virtual book launch for the collection will be streamed on Facebook Live from 7-8pm Sept. 13. Find a link at www.richardterrill.com.