Robert Schultz
Elegy
Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact,
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
Put your make-up on, fix your hair up pretty,
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
- Bruce Springsteen
At the park, by this fountain, only pattern matters.
Water jets from green brass like a tree
Branching, hangs for a moment, then falls and shatters
In the fountain pan, dispersing like leaves
In soil; then it’s drawn back up through dark
Pipes to be thrown again into sunlight. Trees
Around it trace slower patterns. Beneath their bark,
Springs rise. Oaks are fountains, their leaves
Pressing out, and willows are fountains. The park’s
Gardens bloom and fail, rising with apparent ease
And falling with grace. Flowers throw brief coronets;
Geranium blossoms fall like memories
Left with friends, the ones who will not forget.
Like leaves our flesh grows old and withers;
Like water it rose─bright jets.
Robert Schultz’s books include two collections of poetry, Vein Along the Fault and Winter in Eden, a novel, The Madhouse Nudes, and a work of nonfiction, We Were Pirates: A Torpedoman’s Pacific War. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Award in Fiction, Cornell University’s Corson Bishop Poetry Prize, and, from The Virginia Quarterly Review, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry. He and Binh Danh spoke recently at the National Gallery of Art about their upcoming word and image exhibition, War Memoranda: the Civil War, Walt Whitman, and Renewal. Since 2004 Schultz has been the John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.
Return to May 2014 Edition
Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact,
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
Put your make-up on, fix your hair up pretty,
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
- Bruce Springsteen
At the park, by this fountain, only pattern matters.
Water jets from green brass like a tree
Branching, hangs for a moment, then falls and shatters
In the fountain pan, dispersing like leaves
In soil; then it’s drawn back up through dark
Pipes to be thrown again into sunlight. Trees
Around it trace slower patterns. Beneath their bark,
Springs rise. Oaks are fountains, their leaves
Pressing out, and willows are fountains. The park’s
Gardens bloom and fail, rising with apparent ease
And falling with grace. Flowers throw brief coronets;
Geranium blossoms fall like memories
Left with friends, the ones who will not forget.
Like leaves our flesh grows old and withers;
Like water it rose─bright jets.
Robert Schultz’s books include two collections of poetry, Vein Along the Fault and Winter in Eden, a novel, The Madhouse Nudes, and a work of nonfiction, We Were Pirates: A Torpedoman’s Pacific War. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Award in Fiction, Cornell University’s Corson Bishop Poetry Prize, and, from The Virginia Quarterly Review, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry. He and Binh Danh spoke recently at the National Gallery of Art about their upcoming word and image exhibition, War Memoranda: the Civil War, Walt Whitman, and Renewal. Since 2004 Schultz has been the John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.
Return to May 2014 Edition