Gary Whitehead

Rating: 4.67
Rating: 4.67

Gary Whitehead Poems

When I open its pages my dog stirs
from his repose on the couch beside me
to sniff at the spine and trim. His gray ears
lift to listen, and I hear what he hears:
...

If memory had fingers, it would wring
from me each forgettable day we shared.

The double-date drive to Plum Island
in the pouring rain, windows fogged
...

There should be a word for the way
they look with just one eye, neck bent,
for beetle or worm or strewn grain.
"Gleaning," maybe, between "gizzard"
...

In the garden of the mind the best thought
will never bloom as beautifully as this
lily, lemon-yellow and freckled red,

four tongues lolling out of a single mouth
...

Rolling nests of the prairie,
prickered and denuded and dead,
clutching at clumps, skipping across
asphalt, whole shrubs ripped out
...

I wake now to a house as cold
as your side of our double bed.

Across the threshold, in the dark
hall, the thermostat sparks
...

For two nights now it's wakened me from dreams
with a sound like paper being torn, reams

of it, a scratching that's gone on for hours.
Blind in the dark, I think of my father's
...

8.

I like to slice them along the seam,
blade balanced on the fulcrum of pit
—that density, like bone, inside the flesh—
and roll until it's cut clean through.
...

Gary Whitehead Biography

Gary Joseph Whitehead is an American poet, painter, and cruciverbalist. He is the author of Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps (David Robert Books, 2008), The Velocity of Dust (Salmon/Dufour Editions, 2004), After the Drowning (Finishing Line Press), A Cool, Dry Place (White Eagle Coffee Store Press), and Walking Back to Providence (Sow's Ear Press). His work has appeared worldwide in journals, magazines and newspapers and most notably in The New Yorker and Poetry. His awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, two Galway Kinnell Poetry Prizes, a Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship at Iowa State University, and a Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award in 2003. He has held artist residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Mesa Refuge, and the Heinrich Böll cottage in Ireland. Whitehead was the founding editor of the now-defunct Defined Providence Press. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency Award, and spent April though October, 2005 in a secluded cabin in the woods of southwestern Oregon. Whitehead's crossword puzzles have been published in The New York Sun, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and, most notably, The New York Times. He also has had his puzzles published in Games magazine. Well known for his poetry, Whitehead is also a painter whose "oil paintings" appear in private and corporate collections in America and the United Kingdom. He currently teaches at the National Blue Ribbon School of Tenafly High School in Tenafly, New Jersey)

The Best Poem Of Gary Whitehead

A Used Book

When I open its pages my dog stirs
from his repose on the couch beside me
to sniff at the spine and trim. His gray ears
lift to listen, and I hear what he hears:
traffic horns, a teapot's whistle, the purrs
of the reader's cats on her old settee.

What was she doing reading such heady
stuff so early on a Saturday—sun
not yet risen, her lover still asleep?
The book, I guess, her company to keep,
and the cats, while the light kept its steady
course across her floor. Paris or London,

I imagine, though it was probably
San Francisco, a streetcar passing by
and fog rinsing the morning air. A gray
day then, much like any other. It may
be that she, too, drawn irresistibly
to its place on a shelf in a nearby

shop, blew the dust and bought it second-hand.
And perhaps her cats roused when she opened
its cover, catching the vague scent of dog,
and she got no further than the prologue
before she was off to some other land
where a man held a page against the wind.

Gary Whitehead Comments

Beth Lapointe 23 March 2019

A Writer's Almanac led me to read Driving All Night, which compelled me to see what else I could learn of you before I take the trip to Gibson's. You gave me titles, and words of things that make me nostalgic and comfortable like used books, tumbleweeds, chickens, and I think grey flowers, and then Plum Island. Then disagreeable like cold houses, Pawtucket, crossword puzzles. Thank you for a thoughtful and unexpected March afternoon.

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