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      September 9, 2016The Poet Abandons His CraftPeter J. Curry

      First to go were the adjectives,
      which centuries ago the Zen masters
      likened to clouds obscuring Mt. Fuji.
       
      Images were no great loss: The people
      leaving the subway he rides look nothing
      like petals on a wet, black bough.
       
      Next went all the soon’s and then’s:
      As everyone knows who has received
      bad news, everything happens at once.
       
      And memory, which provided most
      of his subject matter, proved unreliable,
      so there’d be no more looking back.
       
      What’s left? He thinks maybe he was
      in love … long ago … in summer. But since
      he’s closed up shop, who’s to say?

      from #52 - Summer 2016

      Peter J. Curry

      “In his memoir, The Words I Chose, Wesley McNair says that ‘poets are menders of broken things.’ When I think about the poems I’ve written, I see they come mostly from that impulse—to mend something, or to bring some kind of order to an obviously broken world.”

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