At Hald Hovedgaard Estate-Medieval Writing Desk

← v10n1, Spring 2011

The guest whose father has died

describes his last gasp—huhp,

she says, breathing in quickly.

What kind of talk is that?

(It is only one person at table

who hears.) The writing desk

There is a blotter, and some writing

still depressed in it. “The image,

however good, however Godlike,

is not God,” it will be revealed,

later that night, by the rubbing

they shush over it.

mortality place grief

David Keplinger

David Keplinger is the author of three books: The Prayers of Others (2006), winner of the 2007 Colorado Book Award, and The Clearing (2005), both from New Issues Poetry & Prose, as well as The Rose Inside: Poems (Truman State University Press, 1999), chosen by Mary Oliver for the T.S. Eliot Prize of that press. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is also the author of World Cut with Crooked Scissors (New Issues, 2007), which he co-translated with Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielsen. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Florida Review, AGNI, Nimrod, and Minnesota Review. He currently teaches at American University in Washington, D.C.