Suzanne Buffam

Suzanne Buffam Poems

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house
To match my dark mood.

I have left all the sugar out of the pie.
...

I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.

They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.
...

The last line should strike like a lover's complaint.
You should never see it coming.
And you should never hear the end of it.
...

Fate piles up
On the bloody Norman shore.
If you must swim there
Swim on your back.
...

Little patches of grass disappear
In the jaws of lusty squirrels

Who slip into the spruce.
Cars collapse into parts.
...

Any idiot can become a genius if she wants it badly enough.

One must study how the crow flies.

One must say to oneself as the crow flies so fly I.
...

I am not a wise man. This makes my life difficult in certain ways. But in other ways it simplifies things. I find it hard to sit still very long before I get up and wander the halls in my hat for example. On the other hand I stay warm and keep moving. Could these ways be the same way?
...

The time and place and manner of my death are three facts that don't exist yet.

Facts exist for whole centuries and then suddenly cease.

Pluto used to be a planet and now it is a chunk of debris, number 1341340.
...

Wind rips splendor from the trees
and lays it at our feet.
Some of us hungry,
...

10.

Low cirrocumulous clouds in the west.
War in the east.

Lift teabag from cup.
Add milk. Ask if it is happiness
...

In the beginning was the world.
Then the new world.
Then the new world order
...

I'm done crying into my beer about love.

My days of riding the shiny brass schoolbus are behind me as well.

The changes come slowly but suddenly.
...

To be small among voices.
To wear the black hat.
To kneel in the shavings.
...

Somewhere on the planet it was midnight.
Someone was using her mouth

to say the word mouth. Someone else
was looking at the sky not listening
...

Suzanne Buffam Biography

Suzanne Buffam is a Canadian poet, author of three collections of poetry. Her first, Past Imperfect (House of Anansi Press, 2005), won the Gerald Lampert Award in 2006. Her second, The Irrationalist (Carnarium Books, 2010), was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her third, A Pillow Book, was published in 2016. Her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including Poetry, Jubilat, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Books in Canada, and Prairie Schooner; and in anthologies including Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets. She earned an MA in English from Concordia University in Montreal, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Born in Montreal and raised in Vancouver, B.C., she lives in Chicago. Buffam was a judge for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize.)

The Best Poem Of Suzanne Buffam

Enough

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house
To match my dark mood.

I have left all the sugar out of the pie.
My rage is a kind of domestic rage.

I learned it from my mother
Who learned it from her mother before her

And so on.
Surely the Greeks had a word for this.

Now surely the Germans do.
The more words a person knows

To describe her private sufferings
The more distantly she can perceive them.

I repeat the names of all the cities I've known
And watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home.

What does it mean to love the life we've been given?
To act well the part that's been cast for us?

Wind. Light. Fire. Time.
A train whistles through the far hills.

One day I plan to be riding it.

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