
After the Point of No Return
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"Wagoner's words are a living link to the world, enacting it so vitally that they feel like natural facts."-The Seattle Times
In his twenty-fourth book of poetry, David Wagoner reflects on youth, love, regret, and expectation versus reality. Here a master writes at top form, back-dropped by life's curious moments and imagining Jesus as an untidy roommate or considering our final destination in "Beginner's Guide to Death."
"After the Point of No Return"
After that moment when you've lost all reason
for going back where you started, when going ahead
is no longer a Yes or No, but a matter of fact,
you'll need to weigh, on the one hand, what will seem,
on the other, almost nothing against something
slightly more than nothing and must choose
again and again, at points of fewer and fewer
chances to guess, when and which way to turn.
That's when you might stop thinking about stars
and storm clouds, the direction of wind,
the difference between rain and snow, the time
of day or the lay of the land, about which trees
mean water, which birds know what you need
to know before it's too late, or what's right here
under your feet, no longer able to tell you
where it was you thought you had to go.
David Wagoner is the author of two dozen books of poetry and ten novels. A longtime teacher at University of Washington, he was the editor at Poetry Northwest. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
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Content
- Cover
- Return
- Note to the Reader
- Dedication
- Contents
- 1
- After the Point of No Return
- A Brief History
- The Ends of My Fingers
- The Fun House
- Convivium
- Driving
- In the Congregational Basement
- Kissing Cousins
- A Footnote to the History of theNew York Central Railroad
- My Father's Body
- My Lost Uncles
- Mother's Night
- Onstage
- Walking Along the Beach with a Five-Year-Old
- Pleasant Dreams
- For My Daughters during Their First Penumbral Eclipse
- Playground
- The Boy Who Ran Away from Me
- 2
- A Letter to an Old Poet
- How to Live
- Writing for Money
- That Night in London
- The Hazards of Serenading
- Preaching to the Choir
- Breakfast with Salesmen before the Poetry Reading
- On Being Asked Once More What a Poem Is
- Being a Model
- On the Persistence of Metaphor
- Long Overdue Praise for Her
- Orpheus Practicing
- Listening
- Signing
- Never Let Your Characters Sit Down
- At the Farewell Performance of Henry Ellsworth
- Before the Poetry Reading
- Striking the Set
- Aristotle Comes to a Conclusion
- 3
- Going Back to the Sea
- Ashes
- By a Pond
- By a Creek
- The Cherry Tree
- In a Greenhouse
- Rain Dance in a Rain Forest
- Dust Devil
- Your Tree
- Meeting a Stranger
- Panic
- Among Brambles
- Foxhole
- Photographing Snakes
- What the Marine Biologist Told Me
- Thoreau and the Mud Turtle
- Thoreau and the Loose Cow
- Thoreau and the Lightning
- The Fly
- At the Ostrich Farm
- Pig Dance
- The Last Good Hour of a Worker Bee
- The Dead
- 4
- This Is Only a Test
- Marksmanship
- Under Fire
- At Dawn on the Fifth of July
- Fighting the Blizzard
- Rooming with Jesus
- Running the Four Hundred Meters
- Life Class
- Overheard at Dinner in the Home of a Recent Widow
- The Minutes of the Last Meeting
- A Preface to the History of Chairs
- By the Empty Stone
- Pounding Swords into Ploughshares
- The Salute
- Instructions for the Caretaker
- On the Road
- A Zodiac for the Twenty-Second Century
- The Bitter End
- 5
- Lost in Thought on an Extension Ladder
- Off Balance
- The First Law of Thermodynamics
- The General Theory
- Falling into Place
- Helping the Home Patient Fall Asleep
- A Cold Call
- In Memory of His Memory
- Coolness under Fire
- Our Bodies
- For Their Second Childhood
- In the Nursing Home
- The Name
- A Beginner's Guide to Death
- About the Author
- Books by David Wagoner
- Acknowledgments
- Copyright
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