Geoffrey Nutter

Geoffrey Nutter Poems

Geoffrey Nutter Biography

Geoffrey Nutter is the author of four collections of poetry: The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013); Christopher Sunset (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award; Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (Wave Books, 2005), winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize; and A Summer Evening (Center for Literary Publishing, 2001), winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize. He teaches at New York University and lives in New York.)

The Best Poem Of Geoffrey Nutter

Electricity

Children picking through the rocks
beside the river on a spring day.
What are they looking for? Old green
net tangled on broken pilings; a couple
embracing on the tumbledown esplanade.
Some fishermen drinking beer from tall brown bottles.
Broken shells, tire treads, rusted aluminum pull-tabs—
downriver, near the sun, the great echoes
and the embers of the bridge; and upriver,
far away, the echoing spools and dynamos
of the dam, its forces crackling outward
like the giant snow crab's jointed legs,
like a web in sunlight, a net, a chorus
of embers, like a plan the river is planning,
abstract, afire and electric, glowing
in the levitating rubric, invisible,
visible to children, undiscovered:
Brace yourselves—electricity
is coming to us.

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