Bruce Bond
Bruce Bond Poems
If you are going there by foot, prepare
to get wet. You are not you anymore.
You are a girl standing in a pool
of clouds as they catch fire in the distance.
...
Dear guitar, my Cyclops, my raft,
my drunken casket, my doll
without arms, my willow, my ink,
...
It's the lantern that we look to most,
there in the shape of a man with his dark hat
and radiant head, his arms cut short,
...
So many grains, so many little tombs
of dust. It keeps us humble: the deceased,
always slightly larger than their time,
larger than us, no less, just as a breeze
...
Lynchpin of the singing wheel,
you with the silver of your call
so tiny and, yes, unmusical
...
What is it you forget in your vigil,
cell after cell like petals on the grave
of first days, so often strange, your veil
of skin ruffled, renewed, as if you grieved
...
To the locusts that blur the lyres of their shells,
I leave my blindness at the end of day.
To the distant whistle of the train at dusk,
...
Scat singing for the sleep deprived—
it's what the critics called his
final music, his ship that plowed
...
No larger than a bird coffin,
the kind that opens its one wing
onto a sky it cannot take to,
...
As the mobile of planets wheeled over my crib,
their shadows darkened the yellow walls:
...
My father takes smaller steps
in his eighties, his body leaning
slightly forward as if against
...
Bruce Bond Biography
Bruce Bond (born 25 June 1954) is an American poet and creative writing educator at the University of North Texas. Bond earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Pomona College, a Master of Arts degree in English from Claremont Graduate School, and a Masters in Music Performance degree from the Lamont School of Music of the University of Denver. He then worked several years as a classical and jazz guitarist. In 1987, he earned a PhD in English from the University of Denver. Since then, he has taught at the University of Kansas, Wichita State University, Wilfrid Laurier University (in Canada), and the University of North Texas, where he currently is a Regents Professor of English and Poetry Editor, with Corey Marks, of American Literary Review.)
The Best Poem Of Bruce Bond
The Delta
If you are going there by foot, prepare
to get wet. You are not you anymore.
You are a girl standing in a pool
of clouds as they catch fire in the distance.
There are laws of heaven and those of place
and those who see the sky in the water,
angels in ashes that are the delta's now.
They say if you sweep the trash from your house
after dark, you sweep away your luck.
If you are going by foot, bring a stick,
a third leg, and honor the great disorder,
the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds.
Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can,
knowing there is a little water in things
you take for granted, a little charity
and squalor for the smallest forms of life.
Voodoo was always mostly charity.
People forget. If you shake a tablecloth
outside at night, someone in your family
dies. There are laws we make thinking
it was us who made them. We are not us.
We are a floodplain by the Mississippi
that once poured slaves upriver to the fields.
We are a hurricane in the making.
We could use a magus who knows something
about suffering, who knows a delta's needs.
We understand if you want a widow
to stay single, cut up her husband's shoes.
He is not himself anyway and walks
barefoot across a landscape that has no north.
Only a ghost tree here and there, a frog,
a cricket, a bird. And if the fates are kind,
a girl with a stick, who is more at home,
being homeless, than you will ever be.
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