Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Not Yet Transfigured (Orison Books, 2021). A chapbook called The Future Perfect: A Fugue is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Pankey is the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University.
Poetry
Winter 2023
Notes Home
Ice on the pines. Cold Realm of geometry: Stark verticals against A shadow-anchored mountain. : : A moment dilates. Takes on mass. Fog lags as tangled dark matter. Rocky edges, […]
Poetry
Autumn 2005
Self-Portrait without a Subject
He carries winter within him: a book's clasp shut and locked. He, he calls himself, to postpone his own belatedness. He forgets the map; when he looks down, he finds […]
Poetry
Winter 2001
In Absentia
The sky is indigo and potash: The lodestar banked and maculate. The evening star affixed by salts. I take as my shelter a mirage. In these shadows, a legion […]
Poetry
Winter 2001
Striking the Copper Bowl to Imitate the Singing Dragon
For Charles Wright All evening the dark bleeds through: A shiver of loosestrife, Amethyst, then gray, Rice-paper ink-washed, An octopus spilled and tumbled From its nether-lair, Then overexposed, […]
Poetry
Winter 2001
Venetian Afterthought
If a lit chandelier is lowered Slowly by rope, then a lit chandelier Rises slowly from the canal's murk, From a mildew's blues and silvers, From the foretold and […]
Poetry
Winter 2001
Small Corpus
There where the thread breaks, There where the sequestered asphodel opens, There where the prayers are blown out With the votives, a zodiac of live coals, An ossuary of […]
Poetry
Winter 2001
Epitaph
Beyond the traceries of the auroras, The fledgling fires of tattered sea foam, The ghost-terrain of submerged icebergs; Beyond the black sands of a cinder dome; Beyond peninsula and archipelago, […]
Poetry
Winter 2001
The Lesson of Snakes
The seedpods of the catalpa drooped and curled And the red ants traced the ravine's limestone ridge, Followed the length of roots and fossils downward To the water's edge, to […]
Poetry
Summer 1993
Don Giovanni in Hell
1. To the Reader The owl and bell betray the hour. This is my kingdom beyond boredom, In which I am subject and object. Desire requires a foretaste Of loss. […]
Poetry
Summer 1991
Formal Concerns
The half-known and faceted fragments cohere: The room’s tangent planes, a retreat of green, A lamp against the shade’s disarray, Plum tree and marsh. The window charts Reflection, recesses, and […]
Poetry
Summer 1991
The Deposition
Dead weight in their embrace, An accommodation, A crude translation into the temporal, The body becomes its form: Broken and commonplace, Flawed enough to be true. They maneuver it clumsily, […]
Poetry
Summer 1991
Eschatology
Candor and clamor at the end of thingsGlares and rings in a grammar that givesEach word its place through clairvoyance. It is not the lure of a past, grayIn summer […]
Poetry
Autumn 1987
Natural History
For David I Light settled in slowly like silt in the choked-off creek bed,until morning. Time passed like that. After a long hunt for fossils in the scarped and silveryclay […]
Poetry
Autumn 1987
Permanence
Those days, I still say. Those daysas clear as light off frost or the not quite magenta,almost red of the peony floating in the silver bowl.Floating, then falling apart, petals […]
Voices in American Poetry
Summer 1984
Chekhov on the Way to Singapore
This kind of fear is not new to me.One night on the inland trip, I woke to a breeze of dust and mosquitoes.The moon, liquid and turquois, reflected on the […]
Voices in American Poetry
Summer 1984
Encounters
For My Father I He began to climb the slender tree his weight familiar beneath him as he pulled.Where the waxy leaves grew thin, he could look down over […]
Poetry
Winter 2023
Empty Calendar
Snail-scrawl in tidal mud. The drift of clouds as a compass. A network of repetitions, The chance encounter prepared for. Pale, luminous: a vast distance. The moment comes around At […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2017
A Map of Venice
The dark descends. Warm air shimmers At the rendezvous we call the horizon. The wind, what wind there is, is hardly tangible: A memory of silk pulled across Pale skin […]
Poetry
Fall 2014
Ars Poetica
The first people watch the drama of their fireside shadows and, even before the camp-following wolves lose their voices, the ritual sharing and eating of food replaces sacrifice A forethoughtA […]
Poetry
Fall 2011
Numinosum
At the threshold of the divine, how to know But indirectly, to hear the static as Pattern, to hear the ragtag white noise as song— No, not as song—but to […]
Poetry
Fall 2011
Preparatory Drawing for an Unfinished Triptych
A girl unwinds a skein of yarn as a promise of marriage; a long line of ants carries a dowry of gold. What is a song but a snare with […]
Spring 2013
Speculation on the History of Drawing; Speculation on the Little Ice Age
Speculation on the History of Drawing
The tool,
A burnt stick,
Extends the body