I recently sent two recent poems to an august periodical ahead of The Perfect Book. I appear to be in a creative purple patch, producing well in excess of the four poems a year that I've long regarded as cruising speed.
You look at various poetry magazines, who they publish, what they do, their submission rules and wonder how long it will be before the poem sees print and, really, forget it. I'm not that interested. But maybe I can just e-mail so and so. And, yes, that's fine, one of the two will be in the next issue as long as there is space for it. So, even if it doesn't appear, at least I have one of the kindest rejection notes in literary history.
Except that they liked the other one best, not this one. You can never tell. But it means I can use it here.
Windy Miller
There
was no sign of children
and
his obituary
in
the local paper would one day say
he never married. And so
he
was the last of them
to
be at home there in the creaking mill.
We’ll
never know whether or not
one
of those sails sliced him
in
half or if it was the cider
that
got him in the end.
Meanwhile
it was his time there,
that
once looked like forever,
when
simple was as simple did
and
nobody complained.
He’d
have waved if he’d seen you
if
you’d seen him in the hedgerows,
unaware
he was idyllic,
on
his day off from the corn.