Arthur Smith
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    • The Fortunate Era (2013)
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Elegy on Independence Day
(Pitt Poetry Series, 1985)

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Praise for Elegy on Independence Day

"The great poignancy of Smith’s poetry leaves its imprint on readers’ minds, returning them to this book again and again.  His writing, elegiac in tone, holds a fine tension that reverberates through one’s own personal life.  I find myself touched by these deeply given and deeply felt poems."  — Carolyn Forché
Hurricane Warning

I still have, somewhere, 
A photograph of her
      and me leaning out over a balcony railing,
Behind us, I remember, the bay windows
      wickered with tape

And the sky spanned
By a single cloud, its underbelly, here and there, smeared
      with that blood-orange hue
We once saw a field of poppies take on


Just before dusk, in the foothills
South of Sonora.  There were always poppies, it seemed,
      washing up and dwindling to a golden point on a hillside
Otherwise green
      with wild oats and weeds,

Or tawny with them, depending.  I don’t know
      what might have become of us in time—ten years, twenty,
The two of us walking off, as lovers
Are supposed to, hand in hand,

Toward one inevitability
      or another—but time would have had a chance
To deal with us, in its own sweet time.
It would have brought us pain,
      and lulled

It all away; it would have made the hillsides
And the swaths of poppies
      fronting as crops of sunlight
All the more difficult, in the end, to leave;
      and toward the end, it may have left

Us both alone.  Along the country backroads,
Wildflowers luxuriate and strive—snowdrops, and buttercups,
And the shooting stars that briefly fan
      their faces to the sun.

You can pull over almost 
      anywhere you want, and wander,
And lie back in whatever blossoms you can find.
All around you the hills, like sea swells,
      are rolling in

Or rolling out,
      and the clouds you’re gazing at
The same, and there seems to be no end of it, no point
      of reference, or anchor,
Except for the faintly bitter scent of the wildflowers
      you chose to walk through, and lie down in.
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