david

Three

Poems

by

David

Starkey

 

audio


Traveling by Train at Night

From Pusan to Seoul, one sees

neon crosses by the hundred
scattered across the hillsides.

Red as the blood of Christ,

says the Mormon missionary
next to me, but he's all wrong.

This wild religion mutates

in its outbreaks around the globe.
Korean crosses are not the color

of holy gore, but the red, rather,

of the peonies growing
in my friend Kim Won-sul's garden,

or the skin of summer plums.

 

--Published in The Grove Review

An Elderly Woman Falls Asleep at a Poetry Reading

And those of us behind her
can't help but smile.
The forty-something poet
sitting next to me--lately

come to her powers as scribe
of the exotic locale
and significant event--
scribbles a note. "Good poem

for you," she digs,
and it's true. From my vantage,
every minor thing is lyrical:
the lace-trimmed dress

scattered with green roses, red-
dyed hair balding at the part.
Her drooping head recovers mid-
metaphor, then drops again,

the wide pink hat with its nosegay
of plastic roses slipping
from her lap like a sheet
of onionskin. Forty-something

snickers at the snoring.
The poet pauses, gestures
grandly. "And those of us
behind her," I begin.

 

--Published in In Praise of Pedagogy

 

Barophobia

For them, it's a matter of the load
we daily bear versus the promise
of ascent. They're overtaxed
by the consequence of earth's rotation.
Better to be jackstraw, they believe,
better to be eiderdown in outer space
than to embrace this ponderous life.
Galileo dropping weights
from the Pisan tower only confirmed
what they'd already feared.
The impact of Newton's laws,
all that mumbo jumbo
about distance, force and mass,
is plain: stay small and far away.
Yet no matter how they try
to huddle and hide, always
there's the deadweight of their dread
urging them to imagine
what they fear most. At night,
the gossamer internet lights up
with their brooding. Later,
their dreams are full of asteroids
breaching event horizons,
that moment when a chunk of rock
becomes something altogether different,
then altogether disappears.

--Published in the Notre Dame Review

 

About David Starkey

David Starkey directs the creative writing program at Santa Barbara City College. Among his poetry collections are Starkey’s Book of States (Boson Books, 2007), Adventures of the Minor Poet (Artamo Press, 2007), Ways of Being Dead: New and Selected Poems (Artamo, 2006), David Starkey’s Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002) and Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press’s Spring 2000 chapbook contest. A Few Things You Should Know about the Weasel will be published by the Canadian press Biblioasis next year. In addition, over the past twenty years he has published more than 400 poems in literary journals such as American Scholar, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cutbank, Faultline, Greensboro Review, The Journal, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Nebraska Review, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, Poetry East, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, Texas Review, and Wormwood Review. He has also written two textbooks: Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008) and Poetry Writing: Theme and Variations (McGraw-Hill, 1999). With Paul Willis, he co-edited In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (Iowa, 2005), and he is the editor of Living Blue in the Red States (Nebraska, 2007). Keywords in Creative Writing, which he co-authored with the late Wendy Bishop, was published in 2006 by Utah State University Press.

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