The force of grief is sublime, scattering certainty, reorganizing the world around the fresh absence of the dead. Anthony Robinson’s “88 Days” is a powerful poem, executed with absolute fidelity to that eviscerating feeling. Its technique is gravity: staid couplets, considered lines, confident imagery. That awe-struck, awful, careening sensation of loss is held in place by the weight of language itself. Selected by Anne Boyer
88 Days
By Anthony Robinson
88 DAYS
ago my father died &
The world is still broken
Open like a geode, too
Dazzling to apprehend,
Too terrible to come home
To. These are mountains, furred
Over with wildness where
Goats eat with abandon, these
Are more than metaphors
For absence or removal, more
Than half-completed histories.
We don’t want to live here
Anymore but we have no other
Home. Here in the wild oregano
We can’t touch the wind, we
Can’t even see each other.
Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. After stints in the Navy and academia, Anthony Robinson currently lives and writes in rural Oregon. “88 Days” appears in his first book, “Failures of the Poets,” from Canarium Books.
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