This April marks the 30th iteration of National Poetry Month, which was launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996. To celebrate, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending one great poem to read every (work) day of the month. We make no claim (except when we do) that these poems are the “best” poems in any category; they are simply poems we love. The only other thing they all have in common is that they are available to read for free online, so you can enjoy them along with us. The internet is still good for some things, after all. Today we recommend:
CD Wright’s “Floating Trees”
It’s hard for me to choose just one poem by the wonderful CD Wright, gone too soon in 2016 at age 67 (it is my firm belief that of all the artist types, the poets have the most to say, for the longest). But “Floating Trees” is the one I’d get tattooed across my back, so indelible are its many images in my (sub)consciousness, rising as they often do in may daydreams, unbidden, surprising, almost comforting: “bed of swollen creeks and theories and coils / bed of eyes and leaky pens”; “night of coon scat and vandalized headstones / night of deep kisses and catamenia”; “hangers clinging to their coat / a soft white bulb to its string.”
Also, and let’s be frank here, this is a deeply sexy poem, a poem for grown-ups who don’t think twice about using the word “lover,” who are in so deep they really don’t give a fuck. The sets of paired images from which most of the poem is built feel like intimates locked in clandestine embrace, perfectly matched and only for each other. I marvel at how such a romantic poem is conjured from such unlikely and surprising imagery (“the comb’s sough and the denim’s undeniable rub / the chair’s stripped back and muddied rung”), but such is the special magic of CD Wright.
And though I’m not exactly sure why I find the following line one of the horniest in English literature, I truly do: “like the fir trees he trues her / she nears him like the firs.” Maybe that should be my next tattoo…
