Michael Harty, one of
my students in the KC area master workshop, will be featured with Walter Bargen,
former Missouri Poet Laureate, at the Thomas Zvi Wilson reading 6 pm on April
19, Johnson County Central Resource Library, 9875 W 87th St, Overland Park, KS
66212.
Harty’s tight-knit poems
are full of details, always honed to a purpose, as in this poem:
Later
Vision
In the
end we just get tired
of keeping
things straight
when time
insists on folding
back on
itself like a tissue pattern
pinned
today to some petrofiber
as
yesterday to woven wool.
All day
in our minds we hear
old songs
new-written for today:
as it is
in dreams, when we see ninety
and
twenty at once, smooth faces
overlaid
on those long ruined.
The
cataracted eye sees
through the
ceremonial wall
dividing was from what-could-have-been.
Michael Harty lives and works in Prairie Village, a suburb
of Kansas City. He has had a long career as a psychologist and psychoanalyst.
He started publishing poetry in 2005. They appear in New Litters, Kansas City
Voices Amoskeag, San Pedro River
Review, Coal City Review, Texas Poetry Calendar Midwest Quarterly,1-70 Review, The
Lyric, and others. Two have been nominated for Pushcart prizes, and he
won the 2015 2015 Anne Dittrick Sonnet Writing Contest. His chapbook The Statue
Game is available online: michaelharty.com
© 2014 Michael Harty. Reprinted
with permission and
