Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me
New & Selected Poems
1970-2000
by
Stanley Plumly

and blink out, falling asleep in her chair.
How she bathed and dried them, night after night,
and rubbed their soreness like an intimacy.
How she let the fire pull her soft body through them.

She was the girl who grew just standing,
the one the picture cut at the knees.
She was the girl who seemed to be dancing
out on the lawn, after supper, alone.

I have watched her climb the militant stairs
and down again, watched the ground go out from under her.
I have seen her on the edge of chances—
she fell, when she fell, like a girl.

Someone who loved her said she walked on water.
Where there is no path nor wake.  As a child
I would rise in the half-dark of the house,
from a bad dream or a noisy window,

something, almost, like snow in the air,
and wander until I could find those feet, propped
and warm as a bricklayer's hands,
every step of the way shining out of them.

STANLEY PLUMLY, author of six poetry collections and recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Award, presents his newest poems first, so that readers travel back in time to meet his younger self. Thirty years ago, he wrote with a sweet tentativeness, wary of poetry's depths and mysterious currents. But he quickly gained mastery in lustrous sonnets and more robust and page-filling forms without losing his gentleness and receptivity. In fact, he became such a strong swimmer in the great sea of prosody that he made the ocean a recurrent metaphor in his lyrics, whether heard in the beat of a laboring heart or sensate in the salt of the blood. Plumly also writes often of the in-between states of near-sleep or near-waking, and of people slowly dying, already ghostly. He often remembers his diffident father, ending this quietly beautiful collection with the title poem. Donna Seaman, Booklist

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