Eric Torgersen

Eric Torgersen Poems

In the kitchen window
the coleus I cut down to stumps
to make cuttings for friends
is spreading new leaves to the sun.
...

The Story of White Man Leading Viet Cong Patrol
-AP Dispatch, Des Moines Register, August 4, 1968

The slain enemy resembled
...

That was no language that was your life.
That was a punning linguist.
That was the headline Author Gets Off.
That was an offer of amnesty and amnesia,
...

After the one that sings, and after the one
that can make up poems of a kind right on the spot;
after a girl who didn't . . . walk very well,
took five minutes to get from her seat to the stage
...

Once I woke up in the dark and thought I was blind. There was no light at all. There's always some light.

Blind, I was calm in that perfect dark. Friends would come, and I'd tell them what they had to do. It would be all right.
...

You thrust into the coffin
where your young wife lay cold
and even more hauntingly beautiful
for the tragic manner of her death
...

Children tattooed, pierced and studded, dreadlocked;
parents panicked, indecisive, deadlocked.

Mother to daughter: live as you must, if you must;
for just a bit longer, keep the door to your bed locked.
...

When they draw us, the children,
as great beaming sun-faces
balanced on sticks, waving sticks,
can it be that they see us so soon
...

No, he never led them far away,
willing as they were to follow
and not to go back.
The mountain never opened
...

Thank God he's gone,
on his horse
of all colors-
...

On the streets of Mérida, beggars and vendors
of shirts and hammocks and panama hats.
We perfect our no. But there's always something
we can't help saying yes to: I want to join
...

All seeing is joy
when it is simply seeing.
It is from the mind
that the trouble comes.
...

If I, as I drive the Caravan
with its nagging blister of rust
on the driver's side door
home from the office on the day
...

It made me feel small, like a husband,
and I never married, never owned

a table worth turning over, china
worth shattering, linen worth blood
...

In one of the open-air restaurants
along the beach at Progreso
three shy pretty Indian girls
danced for us with trays bottles
glasses balanced on their heads
...

16.

Hang him from a tree he hasn't hung from yet.
Fling him off a bridge no one's been flung from yet.

Send succor, in whatever dark disguise:
a hornet's nest he's not gone running, stung, from yet.
...

17.

we find it
and photograph it

bury it out of sight
and try to sleep with it
...

A crackpot gringo in Guatemala told me:
when the pilots of the suicide planes began
their dives down at the ships they were already dead.
Coming from him, a smug didactic metaphor.
...

There's never been a poet where I live,
but I grew up in the shade of Whitman's name:
born in West Hills—our hills—he would have walked
our paths along the crest. I walked Whitman Road,
...

20.


Whitman felt his ribs and found the fat holy.
Poor mad Smart found Geoffrey the cat holy.

Growing up on Yankee turf I found
a Mickey Mantle Louisville Slugger bat holy.
...

Eric Torgersen Biography

Eric Torgersen has published poetry, fiction, essays and a full-length study of Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker. He also translates German poetry, especially that of Rainer Maria Rilke and Nicolas Born. He was born in Huntington, New York. He has a BA in German Literature from Cornell University; after two years in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, he earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. He retired in the spring of 2008 after 38 years of teaching writing at Central Michigan University. He lives in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan with his wife, the quilt artist Ann Kowaleski. His next book of poems, Heart. Wood., will be published in 2012 by Word Press.)

The Best Poem Of Eric Torgersen

New Leaves

In the kitchen window
the coleus I cut down to stumps
to make cuttings for friends
is spreading new leaves to the sun.

Small hairs
the light catches
rise from the new leaves;
red seeps into green
along the veins.

The newest
is brightest.

The plant
cocks intelligent
faces
at the sun
and looks and looks and looks.

I would visit my friends
but feel troubled and shy.

Eric Torgersen Comments

Michael Morgan 13 June 2012

Hi, thanks for reading. I enjoy your pieces mucho. How are things in Michigan? Remember it fondly, I do. There is nothing like Lake Superior. Cheers, MM

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