Robert Wrigley teaches at the University of Idaho. His sixth book, Lives of the Animals, will be published later this year by Penguin, which also published his Reign of Snakes, winner of the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Award.
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2015
Conservator’s Statement
Things, stuff, keepsakes, doodads; junk, curios, and conversation pieces; souvenirs, trinkets, paraphernalia, oddball collectibles. Items ineffably indisposable, whatnots and weird effects, worthless and invaluable. Memorabilia, mementos, weird magnets and rigamarole, […]
Poetry
Autumn 2006
A Photograph of Philip Levine, on the Brooklyn Promenade, May 2000, Lower Manhattan in the Background
Arthur Lieberman, the cousin in Levine’s poem,turned to watch the day’s last light subsidingover the East River and suffered… what?An attack? a premonition? His son, fallingto the Manhattan streets on […]
Poetry
Autumn 2005
Yorick
The big bull moose I call Hamlet mouthed a wad of ninebark leaves, ruminating in the way of his kind, but also ours, having noticed, I noticed, the long gone […]
Poetry
Autumn 2005
Jig
One wet night in a sealed tube of plastic sewer pipe and the bail of birch will bend between the jig's blocks to become the crown of a Windsor chair's […]
Poetry
Spring 2003
Agency
They stumble now and then, the deer, like any other walking thing, even those not unlike themselves, four-legged but less elegant and fleet—cows in a bog, the clumsy, over-bred, domesticated […]
Poetry
Spring 2003
Mummy of a Mouse
Spit back to sun by an owl or a snake, it’s a frail leather purse, gutless and de-boned, stiff enough to hold upright by the pink slip of its tail […]
Poetry
Spring 2002
Clemency
Over the trough, the long face of the horse, and croaking dead center in a hoofprint, a toad—all the while the redwing blackbirds drilling their whistly bells. February, and a […]
Poetry
Winter 1998
Conjure
There is nothing of her body he can’t conjure—texture, heft, taste, or smell. This is heaven, and this is also hell. He can dream the way moonlight comes slant through […]
Poetry
Summer/ Autumn 1997
The Reign of Snakes
1. Revival During the heat of summer days, they sprawl in the shade of sumac glades or hunt the bottom-watered thickets—buck brush and blackberry—dining on mice. And beneath every yellow […]
Poetry
Autumn 1989
Sinatra
That skinny fuck-up, all recklessness and bones, the one your father called feisty, was Prewitt in the movie, and in your twelve-year-old conception of things, in the magical drive-in dark, […]
Poetry
Spring 1989
Sea Flower
When the clock chiming two or three wakes me I am peering into the darkness and the dark of your hair. Nowhere we are touching but there, my eyelashes repeatedly […]
Poetry
Spring 1989
Quail
What we wonder at first is why it won’t go away, but waddles through the hummocks of dandelion and crabgrass, cross the fairway of the cats, from the garden’s coiled […]
Poetry
Spring 1985
The Crèche
It survived the loud, jostling train from Baden to Berlin, and the heave and slant, the pitch, pivot, and lean of the bad boat to New York. She held it […]
Poetry
Spring 1985
Apology
The mottled, mossy sycamores will have to be pruned to thrive. Awkward, top-heavy, they sway and pitch rakish in the winter winds. Spring will tear them down. But you cry […]