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FURTHER READING
Poems by Geoffrey G. O'Brien
From Honey to Ashes
Mixed Mode
The Flagstad Recording
Three Seasons
Essays by Geoffrey G. O'Brien
"Next Year's Words": T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
Poems about Rivers
A Musical Instrument
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A Thought of the Nile
by Leigh Hunt
Afton Water
by Robert Burns
In Passing
by Stanley Plumly
Man in Stream
by Rosanna Warren
Oarlock, Oar (Y, W, V, U, F)
by Katrina Vandenberg
Part of Eve's Discussion
by Marie Howe
Rückenfigur
by Susan Howe
Somewhere between here and Belen
by Jay Wright
South
by Jack Gilbert
Summer Night, Riverside
by Sara Teasdale
The Other Side of the River
by Xi Chuan
The Outlet (162)
by Emily Dickinson
Written on the Banks of the Arun
by Charlotte Smith
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Vague Cadence

 
by Geoffrey G. O'Brien

An away of practice the other is
Like a river out of acts the other is
Hapless, unheard, with marks upon him
Having dallied in tarrying unwisely
Backlit at an undecidable remove
In a house of marks the other is
Useless deciding whether to go
Or wait in best practices like a child
A hapless river filled with sand
For years it flows like unmarked rope
Years of saying as it moves away
Are the undecided water others bring
Like the child of acts the other is
Saying to himself the other is
A hapless river practicing its flow
A house that moves to where one was
With all years off the water goes
The lights are on so the dark is out
Like the useless children others are
A certain building dream within
A part of speech without a name






From Metropole, published by University of California. Copyright © 2011 by Geoffrey G. O'Brien. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
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