Ed Skoog
Ed Skoog Poems
I rode my bike across the Argentine.
Marble arms raised for joy in the garden,
a slush of sculpture salvaged from wrecked ships
...
Rust in seaside wood and land
rediscover soul more than name
while bog dismantle bark
...
Each morning, I checked the radiator
to see what it had been singing
all night into the drip basin,
then pulled on my child-wardrobe
...
babies are gigantic
they raze whole societies
crumble ways into dust
...
That highway still fights north
its semis and sedans. Seasons flash.
I age. The dog ran because it was a fool
...
This morning on the municipal fishing pier
the homeless are filming a movie on the stairs
called lunch, featuring dried fish. I only mention
...
Hill of stubble in moonlight, the hog
bristles across the lawn,
eats whole bouquets, eats bouquets whole,
...
Meanwhile I am preparing
a way to miss the exiting animal
grizzly bear whooping crane
the slow hesitant and administrative desert tortoise
...
From inside the secondhand store I admire
twenty amber ashtrays in the window
lacquer slathered on wooden lamps
all hanging-on to sun made ashtray-amber
...
The old man we pick up in Browning
coughs diesel and range
snow blocks us from fishing the reservoir
...
A Mile Outside of Yellowstone
loose sky fallen into bruise
I put down my hitchhiking sign
wait for dawn at a gas station
...
At the western outfitters the clerk
shows me a photo of the musk ox
he dropped near Kotzebue
...
in scarf and boot turn
around our neighbor's pine,
spill grog into snow,
...
Silly now, when she visits
dreams, or I visit her, my mother,
in new condos at brief's edge
where the neon restaurant's lawn
...
My last look around the house
took so long that the vine
climbing the rosebush climbed
...
To leave you is like waking, or refusing to wake,
in that way the body has of haunting itself.
Returned to your hand, I'm an astronomer
...
in scarves and boots
turn around our neighbor's pine
spill grog into snow,
approaching our porch with
...
On the street at midnight,
I hear a hat box latch
fall open in an attic closet,
...
When you enter the city of riots, confess
what turns your life has taken,
what is hard-on and what is mineral. Confess
...
Outside the condo window, a sandhill crane
looks down its beak at the estuary's small waves
the way the clerk at the outlet store
...
Ed Skoog Biography
Ed Skoog (born 1971, Topeka, Kansas) is an American poet. He graduated from Kansas State University, and from the University of Montana, with an MFA. He worked at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He taught at Tulane University, and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He lived in southern California, where he was chair of creative writing at Idyllwild Arts Academy. He was writer-in-residence at the Hugo House. He has been the Jennie McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellow at George Washington University. He lives in Seattle and Washington, D.C. He is currently a visiting writer at the University of Montana. His poems have been published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and The Paris Review. The phrase "Mister Skylight" is an emergency signal to alert a ship's crew, but not its passengers, of the emergency. Skoog's debut collection, Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), is an alert to disasters and to the hope of rescue. Interior dramas of the self play out in a clash of poetric traditions, exuberant imagery, and wild metaphor. His second book of poems, Rough Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a 2013 Lannan Literary Selection, finds unity in a fixation on American events and landscapes.)
The Best Poem Of Ed Skoog
Autobiographical
I rode my bike across the Argentine.
Marble arms raised for joy in the garden,
a slush of sculpture salvaged from wrecked ships
around Don d'Carlo's sandstone pen
carved from a boulder fallen from that cliff.
When I was a nude Sicilian youth, and had been
lounging on the piazza for a good hour,
above the sea, I heard a cry from the beach
and ran. A seal pup lay curled around
a stone. Someone- my brothers?- had beat it
senseless, so I heaved the sack of fur
back to surf, the body cooling my body,
and swam some yards until it sank to green.
Back up the steps, I dried on the wall
fell to sleep forgot the beast and grew
athletic and kept my tongue back of my head
obeyed the trainer loved a girl she climbed
a tree beside the training yard to whisper
my secret names from the arbor. War grew
as we slept. I fled across the sea
to escape conjecture; I biked all over
to build a body of forgiveness, the wheels
wearing down a new world of old roads.
I rode across the Argentine, my spokes
speaking for me, to the house of a friend:
I swam in the sea there, among the mangled steel.
A lost flotilla, the hemisphere
tapped in my ear, the ticking of whales
the warnings of sand. And when I drowned
I sank slowly and meant every fathom.
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