K.E. Duffin
Master of the Small Landscapes
An absence of stories troubles the light.
Trees have discarded their leaves, yet retain
a cartoon fullness: this is no season,
the antiquarian murmurs. Even the cities
forget their people, so many families
descending from one house, so many days
stacked like firewood or folded linen.
The scatterer of storms is forgiven.
The boats require emptiness to drift.
No skaters make inaudible glissandos,
caught in celibate skeins of ink.
“Could have been” is hauled by barges
far beyond the city. As if from a knife,
a thumb lets fall a thin paring of sky.
K.E. Duffin’s poetry has appeared in Agni, Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Kestrel, The Louisville Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, The Sun, Verse, and many other
journals. New work is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Pamplemousse, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The SHOp. King Vulture, a book of poems, was published by the University of Arkansas Press.
Return to March 2014 Edition
An absence of stories troubles the light.
Trees have discarded their leaves, yet retain
a cartoon fullness: this is no season,
the antiquarian murmurs. Even the cities
forget their people, so many families
descending from one house, so many days
stacked like firewood or folded linen.
The scatterer of storms is forgiven.
The boats require emptiness to drift.
No skaters make inaudible glissandos,
caught in celibate skeins of ink.
“Could have been” is hauled by barges
far beyond the city. As if from a knife,
a thumb lets fall a thin paring of sky.
K.E. Duffin’s poetry has appeared in Agni, Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Kestrel, The Louisville Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, The Sun, Verse, and many other
journals. New work is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Pamplemousse, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The SHOp. King Vulture, a book of poems, was published by the University of Arkansas Press.
Return to March 2014 Edition