Living by Bill Coyle - The New Criterion

Poems

June 2005

Living

Burke

was right!

In winter, once the ice on the lake is safe,
a group of local ice-fishers build a town
with houses, streets, a store, a tavern—
all the necessities—then move out there.

By day they wait for nothing they sense or see
until a line goes taut like a sudden thought,
and someone lifts a flash of silver
out of an opening in the surface.

With darkness, things are otherwise. Then the lights
that glitter on the shore they have left behind
amount to a new constellation
born in the lowliest part of heaven;

then sometime neighbors head to their tavern, where,
because they know the season is all too brief,

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Bill Coyle's first book of poems, The God of This World to His Prophet, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 23 June 2005, on page 30

Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
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