Susan Mitchell
Susan Mitchell Poems
Tonight the bear
comes to the orchard and, balancing
on her hind legs, dances under the apple trees,
...
At first all you see are the folds
of drapery, high grass close together, swaying
beads you parted as a child, field behind
the house, then river. Sky.
...
Off Havana, the ocean is green this morning
of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather
straps and watch the sky while three couples
who have been dancing on the deck of a ship
...
I ran into the afterlife.
No fluffy white clouds. Not even stars. Only sky
dark as the inside of a movie theater
at three in the afternoon and getting bigger all the time,
...
for Nathaniel, 1900—1968
All afternoon you worked at cutting them down.
Branch after branch tossed
into the heap. You had your ceremony. Old pants. The pipe.
...
Susan Mitchell Biography
Susan Mitchell (born in 1944) is an American poet, essayist and translator who wrote the poetry collections Rapture and Erotikon. Life Mitchell grew up in New York City, New York and now lives in Boca Raton, Florida. She has a B.A. in English literature from Wellesley College, an M.A. from Georgetown University, and was a PhD student at Columbia University. She has taught at Middlebury College and Northeastern Illinois University, and currently holds the Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. She has published poems in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and The Paris Review. Her poems have also been included in five volumes of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize volumes. Awards She has been recognized for her work by notable organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. Her collection, Rapture, won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a National Book Award finalist.)
The Best Poem Of Susan Mitchell
Dragonfly
caught on the wing the wing is a
disarray of sun spots
overtaking
the air black dots on sheer on trans-
parency on wheel and whee
openness so
surprising it rivals invincibility what
is magic to do pull itself
out of a hat
saw itself in two what a to-do
grabs hold of my finger
extended will
not to be shaken free together we are one
stem one spire one shoot upshot
bent at a right
angle to itself so this is what it feels
to be reed a stem with wings
for leaves a
finger that can see how the wind blows what
whir ungloves my breath what whist
what wings two
sets can up can down can blow fast
forward faster re-
verse how is
language to keep up how outwing
those wings their gulps
and gobbles of
ricochet at every bump is this
what the world is this romp
this dizziness a fast
roll of the dice four dots and three hundreds
bounced into life the same
morning bumbling
babies they stub their fantastic
engines on air on me not
at all brainy
like a bow tied like a fancy gift done
up with organza like a spree
a paint-the-town dotty
such extravagance such waste too soon
they stump to a standstill in
puddles on hedges
tossed aside still brand new still shiny
the windup toy that will not wind a
mood run down
should i take back my delight delaminate
what wing was joy but oh my king-
dom for the tip of a branch
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