The End of Landscape



There's a certain sadness to this body of water
adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds,
handful of ducks, the water color
 
manmade. A still life. And still
life's a cold exercise in looking back,
back to Florida, craning my neck
 
like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin.
As for the scrub oaks,
the hot wind in the leaves was language,
 
Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic—
an obsession: I wanted to live in it.
(One professor in exile did,
 
covered himself in the stuff as a joke—
then spent a week removing mites.) That's
enough. The fields of rushes lay filled
 
with water, and I said farewell,
my high ship an old, red Volvo DL,
gone to another coast, another peninsula,
 
one without sleep or amphibious music.
Tonight, in flight from San Francisco—
because everything is truer at a remove—
 
I watch the man I love watch
the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento,
lit city of legislation and flat land.
 
I think of Florida, how flat.
I think of forgetting Florida.
And then the landscape grows black.
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Written on 2009

Submitted by Drone232 on April 28, 2022

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:01 min read
19

Quick analysis:

Scheme AXA BCX XXX DXX XXX XBE DFX XFX XEC
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,027
Words 202
Stanzas 9
Stanza Lengths 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3

Randall Mann

Poet Randall Mann is the author of Complaint in the Garden (2004), which won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry; Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the California Book Award; Straight Razor (2013), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Proprietary (2017) a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award; and A Better Life (2021). He is also the author of a book of criticism, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry (2019), as well as co-author of the textbook Writing Poems (2007). Influenced by Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, and Donald Justice, Mann’s poetry—at once vulnerable, unflinching, and brave in its ambivalence—explores themes of loss, attraction, brutality, and expectation. Of his preference for working in form, Mann says, “Form helps me approach more comfortably the personal, helps me harden argument.” more…

All Randall Mann poems | Randall Mann Books

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