Forever, for Now
Poems for a Later Love
Hardback and Paperback: 103 pp.
Published: 1991
Price: $18.95, $12.50
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These poems follow the first year of a relationship between two middle-aged lovers finding each other after surviving the travails of divorce.
Praise:
In Forever for Now, Mississippi River poet Louis Daniel Brodsky has written a Huckleberry Finn of latter-day love. Cutting loose from worlds that have gone dismally wrong — "desperate, desolate, defunct marriages" — the protagonist and his beloved Janie hide from the world aboard a raft for two, drifting towards self-enfranchisement and love. . . . What love’s skepticism opens for this poet is his participation in the human experience . . . in a recurring history that flows like the river.
— Sanford Budick, founding director of the Center for Literary Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Opening Up the Territory
Actually, this Tuesday morning,
So blue and crisply faceted with refractions
Sunlight casts off autumn's leaves —
Each a microcosmic facsimile
Of an Emersonian prism
Energized by the Universal Eye —
Began seventy-two hours back,
When you and I drove to Laclede's Landing,
In downtown St. Louis,
To pay homage to Eads Bridge
And, like saying rosary,
Count cars of freight trains
As they swayed and screeched over trestles
Connecting our imaginations.
Whether fictive or factual,
This day I now inhale —
Oh, what a sweet, vapored opiate! —
May have commenced millenniums ago,
By divine design or otherwise,
As a glint in the Eye that sees us today,
Seizing each other from separate destinies,
Or maybe it never existed.
Perhaps last Saturday afternoon
Is just now occurring beneath Eads Bridge,
Where we, complete strangers,
Are waiting to catch the next express train
And venture west together,
In search of a fresh conception of love.
