Ed Roberson is the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent book The New Wing of the Labyrinth was published by Singing Horse Press, 2009. City Eclogue was published spring 2006, Number 23 in the Atelos series. His collection Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. His book Atmosphere Condition was a winner of the National Poetry Series and was nominated for the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Award. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, 1970, where while an undergrad research assistant in Limnology, he traveled across Canada through Alaska, Kodiak and Afognak Islands and later Bermuda with research expeditions. He has climbed mountains in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes, motorcycled across the U.S. and traveled in West Africa .Roberson currently lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College and Northwestern University.
THE DOOR
It's never at the door
to leave but it's always at the door
the way the wolf is,
not just on the other side, everywhere
you go the wolf is.
but a due date due to pull one on the moment
the way the wolf is,
what makes the angry difference of the sunniest street
and takes it to the alley where the wolf is.
Its kill of gameness, the essence here, the issue's meat
every hunger ages from milk to bloody meat
the way the wolf is
grown in, begins as the long permanent teeth
gnawing inside the way the wolf is.
VOTING WEATHER
People needed them for the black
cloud they signed as if a petition
in admission overhead there was
no rain only the black as umbrellas
because not the daily day but the longer
historical office in its hours
had destroyed in its rain
of refusing to be named such truth drowned us.
The governmental class statement has
been recorded as we had been poor
and were better off now we were dead.
But it was the funereal wear of umbrellas
that appeared from above to cobble the streets with
the bodies beneath stripped of the pave of their gold.