Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. D. Wright
C. D. Wright
Author of numerous volumes of poetry, Wright has served as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, and in 2013 was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets...
More >
Want more poems?
Subscribe to our
Poem-A-Day emails.
FURTHER READING
Related Poems
Rest.
by Richard Jones
Sponsor a Poet Page | Add to Notebook | Email to Friend | Print

Tours

 
by C. D. Wright

A girl on the stairs listens to her father
Beat up her mother.
Doors bang.
She comes down in her nightgown.

The piano stands there in the dark 
Like a boy with an orchid.

She plays what she can
Then she turns the lamp on.

Her mother's music is spread out
On the floor like brochures.

She hears her father
Running through the leaves.

The last black key
She presses stays down, makes no sound
Someone putting their tongue where their tooth had been.





Audio Clip
March 2, 2007
AWP Conference, Atlanta
From the Academy Audio Archive



From Steal Away: New and Selected Poems by C. D. Wright, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2002. Copyright © 1982 by C. D. Wright. Originally appeared in Translation of the Gospel Back Into Tongues: Poems, published by State University of New York Press, 1982. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved.
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2013 by Academy of American Poets.