Reading before we read, Horoscope and Weather by Wyatt Prunty

Poems

September 1995

Reading before we read, Horoscope and Weather

Burke

was right!

My father laughing over the morning paper
Where the written world fell open on the funnies,
Manic sports, stalled politics … and where
The Horoscope said, “now,” the Forecast, “sunny,”

He couldn’t laugh enough, so skipped a page,
Then another, till the back door shut,
An engine turned, and I woke up his age
In the mirror of a gray no scissors cut.

He backed out of his pulling in at night
As light elbowed past an opened door, failing
Down six empty steps. Now a wall-switch bites
Blue sparks before the neon’s billowing

Over another kitchen’s white-on-white
Enameling; and now the sun is up
And climbing through the windows to a height
I follow out and off beyond the steep

Fence and trees to where the sky ...

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Wyatt Prunty's Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems is available from Johns Hopkins University Press.

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