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.
...

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
...