Eric Torgersen Poems

On the streets of Mérida, beggars and vendors
of shirts and hammocks and panama hats.
We perfect our no. But there's always something
we can't help saying yes to: I want to join
...

All seeing is joy
when it is simply seeing.
It is from the mind
that the trouble comes.
...

If I, as I drive the Caravan
with its nagging blister of rust
on the driver's side door
home from the office on the day
...

It made me feel small, like a husband,
and I never married, never owned

a table worth turning over, china
worth shattering, linen worth blood
...

In one of the open-air restaurants
along the beach at Progreso
three shy pretty Indian girls
danced for us with trays bottles
glasses balanced on their heads
...

Hang him from a tree he hasn't hung from yet.
Fling him off a bridge no one's been flung from yet.

Send succor, in whatever dark disguise:
a hornet's nest he's not gone running, stung, from yet.
...

we find it
and photograph it

bury it out of sight
and try to sleep with it
...

A crackpot gringo in Guatemala told me:
when the pilots of the suicide planes began
their dives down at the ships they were already dead.
Coming from him, a smug didactic metaphor.
...

There's never been a poet where I live,
but I grew up in the shade of Whitman's name:
born in West Hills—our hills—he would have walked
our paths along the crest. I walked Whitman Road,
...

Whitman felt his ribs and found the fat holy.
Poor mad Smart found Geoffrey the cat holy.

Growing up on Yankee turf I found
a Mickey Mantle Louisville Slugger bat holy.
...