Roger Desy works a small body of poems until they work themselves. While we’re born and will die on this planet, our relation to it is intimate. He taught literature and creative writing, edited technical manuals, helped set up a neglected one-room schoolhouse as a venue for readings/music/community programs, raised a family that now raises itself, and “learned cat” from the sweetest tabby that ever adopted one of our kind. A few poems are in Cider Press Review, Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Poet Lore, and South Carolina Review.
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2018
I-80
—it keeps its own low profile—working in the background to the selfless indirections of its own momentum like roadside banks seeded by road repair in their scatter of crown vetch […]
Nature's Nature: A Gathering of Poetry
May/June 2015
stones
there’s plain stone—round flat rough or smooth—there’s the stone in the brook seen through its refractive slant —reach for it—find it settled into place—to the side embedded frozen to […]
Poetry
Jan/Feb 2015
Winter Apples
—common as they are—apples are a strange fruit—bagged by the pound—in baskets mixed with citrus under cellophane or one by one displayed under a veneer of wax over the white […]
Poetry
Jan/Feb 2015
Imprints
— the shards of random icefall pit the slanted clarity of afternoon on the passivity of snow—embedded limbs—erratic sparrow prints —browsing the windbreak—acuity in shadow traces paths of scent […]
Poetry
Fall 2013
take a deer
accelerating on an upgrade—looking straight ahead at a bend in the road with half a mind on the limited visibility of a blind curve —braking in time—take a deer—face to […]
Poetry
Summer 2012
Winter Famine
if a deer dying by starvation does so alone with all its faculties if not intact—if breaking down—reduced to keenness — it would be wrong to feel pity for a […]
Poetry
Spring 2011
a better apple
—unlike varieties of hybrids requiring new genetics— the native fruit stock at the edge of fields—the basic apple with its wild sweetness and its bitter seeds resists the inventories […]
Poetry
Spring 2011
certain movements
—in the decomposition of an apple's pomace matting the seeds at its core against the grass and frost—it's not the surface wisp hissing the stillness deer stir crossing the snow […]