David Cooke
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
There is something to be said
for the low angle of the sun
causing us to slope to tilt
to the angle of repose
to growl at the cat’s mewing
head pets and nine more minutes
There is something to be said
when under blankets we warm
our dreams against the thickening
cold our eyes like a screed of ice
kept closed to the breaking of light
keep dreams apart from thinking
There is something to be said
in the tear-dropped hollow
of a lowercase a which fits
like your thighs on my side-
ways lap rump on my belly
nothing to do makes a chalice of the day
There is something to be said
every morning I wake
under this sky of skeining ripples
with guppies nibbling algae
as we look at each other
with silt in our eyes
David Cooke is one of Portland’s newest poets to be recognized internationally. His debut poem earned the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and a Pushcart nomination. He was crowned champion of AmeriCymru’s Night of the Living Bards and recently won second in the War Poetry Contest. His poems show his love of vivid imagery and colloquial language, his passion for word play and spiritual questioning. He is also a founding member of The Guttery, a writing group, and can be seen performing with the Moonlit Guttery Team.
“David Cooke’s poetry astounds and confronts me: the multitude of angles he is able to examine in his elegant, reflective lines is simply staggering. More than in most work, the reader is offered a vast set of choices on many levels of thought and imagery. Dictionaries spring into action when David’s work is being reviewed in the Guttery. He shines his inquisitive light on the awkward, the unexpected, the in-between. I enjoy his work tremendously.
It’s uncanny that the poem’s final title had emerged before I revealed the name for this series, “Waking Into Speech”. The surrealism of that transitory moment is portrayed with tenderness and precision, with Cooke’s trademark web of allusions and cross-references. Nine more minutes of the alarm’s snooze might become the cat’s nine lives, and an “a” might turn into a tear. As light plays with darkness and our subconscious plays with reality, it is the sharing of the moment with the silt of experience in our eyes that we might take away as a model for harmonious existence in the world.” — A Molotkov
Next Issue features Tim Barnes.