Tonight’s featured poet is James Houlihan, a man I greatly admire not only because he is a very esteemed colleague at the school where I teach, not only because he was a very esteemed professor at the university I attended, not only because he’s a polyglot, but also because he’s brilliant as well as personable.

His author’s resumé is two pages long, but here are some of the highlights:  numerous translations, essays, and individual poems in numerous different publications, and three books of poetry, which are Unified Field (Wooten Press, 1985), Driving Cabeza (Inleaf Press, 2000), and Thirty-One Superior Poems of our Time (Inleaf Press, 2004).

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J’s Further Appearances

 

What can you say to me

When I came through the ice-blue window?

I came for beauty

Where did you think I came from?

That place I appeared and you answered

Is deserted now

Here it’s not metaphor, it’s moral

Every soul guides a chariot with two winged horses

It must be what appears is what I can understand

Condescended to by imagination

I must look like a dragonfly all right angles

Swallowing gnats above a bluish pool.

Why aren’t you listening?

Humans can’t see for very long

Suddenly there are lilies, but where lilies vanished

A misunderstood saint.