The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Fri 5/8/2009) [View All]

Taking the dog out at 2 am

I’ve just slipped past those guards of sleep
who tonight are more like Swedish policemen—
well-meaning but complacent—just as happy
to let me go on my way as detain me here
in this land of the conscious, when you begin
your rhapsodic mantra of barking at the door.

For this I would like to punish you or at least
give a gentle reminder that unlike you, I
haven’t been napping most of the day.

Instead, we are released into air so cold
it works like quicksand on my lungs,
sucking the oxygen from itself as I watch
you canter to the nearest snow drift in your
coat of shimmering black velvet.

With ice cuffs around your ankles,
you look dressed for a midnight ball.

We’re three days away from the longest
night of the year and if I wish for anything
as I count the trunks of the pines you’ve
disappeared into, it’s that heaven, too—
if there is a place we go after this—
will have such a similarly deep and inescapable
darkness for you to root among and for me
to marvel at while I wait for your return.

Keetje Kuipers

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Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. Starting in the fall of 2009, she will be a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.

In 2007 Keetje was the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She used the residency to complete work on her book Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and will be published by BOA Editions in April 2010.

In addition, Keetje has been the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone, as well as awards from Atlanta Review and Nimrod. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Painted Bride Quarterly, Willow Springs, and AGNI, among others, and have been nominated three years in a row for the Pushcart Prize. You can also listen to her read her work at the online audio archive From the Fishouse.

She lives in Missoula, Montana with her dog, Bishop.


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:hi:

RL