David Biespiel is the author of Wild Civility (University of Washington Press) and Shattering Air (BOA Editions). A contributor to American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Parnassus, he also writes the First Sunday on Poetry column for The Oregonian. Biespiel has taught at the University of Maryland, Portland State University, and Stanford University.
He now teaches at Oregon State University and is director and writer-in-residence at The Attic. Past awards include the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in literature.
It comes on like a city in full dress, braided with the funny music
of its rainy streets,
Its finicky night-walkers and odd redeemers
With their gifts of tongues and dreams of credence.
Long ago I got held to the place (like a gruff figure of speech),
and things that used to be certifiable or pathetic or
opportune
Are now prim implosions, modulations, mawkish portions of the
good.
Now as if sensing a new dream of hell hounds coming on, I chain
up
Like a live wire, lucky in the open sesame of nutty cheer or
chasms,
And avoid the foot patrols and relapse into the grainy rigmarole
of my nativism.
Hiding out from sleep as from severe lessons, I run even harder
in place.
