monday poem #108: Ronald Wallace, "The Life Next at Hand"

[heresluck]

I don't like Time's Fancy as much as I did The Makings of Happiness, but I think this is partly because much of Time's Fancy is considerably darker, which isn't really what I was expecting. Perhaps this is why I liked "The Life Next at Hand" so much; it's the first poem in the book, and it has the sense of wonder that I associate with Wallace. I think kassrachel will like this one too; it's got some of the same elements I like in Naomi Shihab Nye's work.

I will say that Time's Fancy has some terrific formal poems, including a couple of forms that I don't recognize except as modified sestinas, that I will be coming back to, because from a technical point of view they are absolutely worth revisiting and examining.

The Life Next at Hand

Behind a camouflage of sticks and debris
we once mistook for a sparrow's routine intrusions
a house wren is building
her nest in the Shopper Stopper box.
Every day when the mailman,
driving, left-handed, his beater,
leans as far into her life as he can,
she gives him what-for in a song.

I have reached in more than once myself
to pull some tiresome sparrow out
of a place meant for something better
before I've found that small cup of promises-
a puff of the tiniest grasses, a twist of snakeskin-
behind the wordy camouflage of the commonplace.

- Ronald Wallace
from Time's Fancy