Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Strange You Never Knew
    Strange You Never Knew
    Strange You Never Knew
    Ebook97 pages44 minutes

    Strange You Never Knew

    By Robert A. Fink

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The thematic motif found within these poems is one of "knowing," the desire to know the mystery of love of different types and on different levels—touching earth and pushing off, flesh and spirit, the life of the senses complementing the spiritual, the dream life of the imagination, desire for the word that speaks light from darkness, the ethereal within the mundane. This "knowing" is contained by our daily living, the sensuous world with which we interact, mostly unaware of its spiritual dimension. The book’s four-section poem sequence is one of immersion into the paradoxical life, the life we come to know and spend a lifetime comprehending its inexplicable beauty. The poems examine our lives of displacement from family, love, ourselves; displacement, however, does not necessarily mean despair. We may discover that our mundane lives transpire in an austere and holy place peopled with angels unaware, and that faith can exist in a place of stone, absolution is available daily, and redemption is found in strange places we never knew.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWings Press
    Release dateJun 1, 2013
    ISBN9781609403034
    Strange You Never Knew

    Related to Strange You Never Knew

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2019

      Four Poems
      7 min read

    • Article

      In The Spotlight:your Writing Dark Side

      Dec 7, 2023

      Spooky season evidently offered creative inspiration aplenty for the WM writers, who responded to the call for writing in November’s crime-themed issue on the theme of ‘Dark Side’ with our fullest mailbox yet. The poetry and prose sent in demonstrate

      4 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2019

      “My arm is so brown and so beautiful,” is a thought I haveas I’m about to turn off the lamp and go to sleep.I look at it a moment in the soft glow, and see it, briefly,as though it belonged to someone else. A reddishkind of brown, like a toasted almo

      7 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      As when listening to a story, children always want to knowthe next thing before sleep until they wake and the morning becomesancient, so too those beginning at love first ask, Is it real?—and then years later,Was it a memory?—only to stare at a vast

      1 min read

    • Article

      selections from YOU ARE HERE: POETRY IN THE NATURAL WORLD

      May 1, 2024

      As part of her signature project, You Are Here, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to observe and reflect on their place in the natural world. The volume was published by Milkweed Editions in April 2024. O

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Plague Legends

      Dec 1, 2021

      The Plague Legends
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Island (catullus 64)

      Mar 1, 2022

      Back then the evergreens tumbled downriverfrom the glaze-white runoff to the boot-stirred puddlesof amber young men who fulfilled our destiny,who clambered into ships, on horses, and in wagonspainting the newfound landscapes ours.Our calling was nobl

      9 min read

    • Article

      Poetry Rx: This Is the Year

      Jan 3, 2019

      Poetry Rx: This Is the Year
      7 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      My Dinner with Denis Johnson

      Jun 25, 2018

      My Dinner with Denis Johnson
      13 min read

    • Article

      Cul-de-Sac

      Dec 1, 2021

      That old rage for order: how my father drove a square mouthed mower over-and-back, over-and-back, each row of neatly trimmed grass cut just like he told his barber: boy’s short, regular. O pioneer, taming this joke bit of prairie, no bindweed or dog

      5 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems by Rohan Chhetri

      Sep 8, 2020

      All summer the half voice lurked behind me & I played deaf for days for to live To not write about it to use my body Part the river’s flesh to operate Machinery is human too to love & for once stay awake through it all. Now it comes like the deer sle

      3 min read

    • Article

      Beautiful In The Distance

      Jun 24, 2019

      Beautiful In The Distance
      10 min read

    • Article

      Bard In The Woods

      Nov 30, 2020

      Bard In The Woods
      4 min read

    • Article

      Sensualiterature

      Mar 29, 2021

      BRIAN DOYLE (1957–2017) was the longtime editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of many books of essays and fiction, most notably the novels Mink River and Martin Marten. ONE OF THE THINGS that we do not talk about w

      3 min read

    • Article

      Are You Lonesome Tonight?

      Aug 8, 2019

      Are You Lonesome Tonight?
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Last Lady of California

      Apr 6, 2021

      The Last Lady of California
      16 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2017

      Sep 11, 2017

      Isn’t that one of the purest goals of poetry—to justify our breaths? To recognize that we matter? The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Station to Station

      Dec 3, 2020

      Station to Station
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Strange You Never Knew

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Strange You Never Knew - Robert A. Fink

      Author

      I.

      Thin Places

      Thin Places

      Heaven and earth are only three feet apart,

      but in the thin places, that distance is even smaller.

      —Celtic saying

      This desiring isn’t indiscriminate,

      nor quickly satiated, surprised how skin

      pressed to skin can regulate its fever,

      cooling to apology for pushing through

      a crowd toward memory’s blue and white print,

      cotton flannel dress, handfuls of auburn hair

      lifting and falling as I call a name

      and stretch to touch a shoulder,

      and the woman, almost whom I expected,

      turns and smiles.

      It must be the desire of angels for angels

      or God for the mother of his child.

      Only in dreams may I press my fingers

      to the cupping just above your hips

      taut and quivering, your lovely, lower back

      arching. Only in dreams…

      no end to touching

      the thin places, almost translucent

      skin on skin,

      heaven and earth.

      Robert Henri’s The Old Model

      Oil on canvas, circa 1912

      She has gathered about her

      a shawl of bleeding colors,

      shades of Iberia and Egypt,

      warm and cool sands sliding

      into, easing beyond each hue

      as a drop of oil, the feathers

      of a raven, contain the mystery

      of purple and what seems at first

      black, then Pyrenees green,

      flash of a Parisienne

      summer dress, the rippling Seine,

      Eden’s palette, plumage of

      jungle birds, the shades of blood

      woven in a matador’s cape,

      the agitated skirts

      of flamenco dancers

      swishing the darkness.

      She is regal, the shawl her cloak

      of royalty dictating a presence

      she has garnered for such a sitting.

      Her eyes, the ebony of polished marble,

      absorb all colors, the only relief

      two pin points of white that hold us

      mute and obeisant before her,

      as it was for Henri, his brushstrokes

      trembling, that indelicate nose,

      those cheekbones, like the eyebrows,

      built high and hard, against which

      a lover would break asunder

      and tumble to the blood-full lips

      no Leonardo could paint,

      her feline smile that of a lioness

      fixed upon the artist’s heart.

      Daphne

      after Steve Neves’ painting Strange You Never Knew

      Not yet the lead arrow, not yet the gold,

      young Eros stringing his bow only for minor poets

      and minstrels, adolescent boys flexing before mirrors,

      fantasizing sixth-grade girls tall as their mothers.

      Daphne is safe, Apollo busy revving up his chariot,

      its flames, for now, stylized. She is inviolate

      as the bay laurel leaves teasing down to touch

      her hair, her cheek, hint of eucalyptol,

      Mediterranean breeze.

      Soon she will transform into skin-slick bark

      and lithesome limbs, spear-tipped glossy leaves,

      forever green, pale flowers paired, the only fruit—

      small, shining, dark-purple berries.

      She will need no tending. No spurned lover’s ax

      can fell her, each blow regenerating, healing

      heedless of the slow turn of seasons—winter to spring.

      Hers is no fanfare resurrection. For no man

      she dies and rises anew from his bed.

      It is only men who paint her, sculpt her soft lines

      into marble, smooth, cold to the touch,

      the best they can know. Eros is petulant

      and unforgiving, his arrows irony-tipped,

      mightier than chariots and music, the feeble poetry

      of middle aged men at writing tables cleared of

      all but a lined tablet, a soft-lead pencil, gooseneck lamp—

      forty watts against the dark of 4:00 a.m.

      And yet, even now, a young man steeped in the classics,

      the poetry of having loved unknown, poetry of dying

      the far, far better death, dreams his Daphne

      in repose, seated before an open doorway, demure,

      eyes pensive, the note unfolded in her lap.

      Her long, auburn hair, her olive skin,

      Grecian nose, pomegranate lips ever so slightly parted.

      He believes the note she reads is his, shy, secret lines

      to hold her, virginal, the only way he can.

      Coming of Age

      How can he know, being

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1