What a Rush
by Ron Smithto see you there in the sun, shining
with your best smile, not in fact
gone forever, waving
off my question, delighted
with my delight, sitting
bony on my lap, which you would never
have done in life, my
proper friend, my neglected familiar.
So this is how it’s going to be, this
angry gratitude, this
torment of the taken-
for-granted? Speak me a sonnet
about Darwin and daguerreotypes
and this time I’ll try not to wake
to the raw dazzle of morning.
for Claudia
Ron Smith has served as Poet Laureate of Virginia since 2014. A native of Savannah, he is writer-in-residence at St. Christopher's School, edits poetry for Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature and has received the Theodore Roethke Prize and the Guy Owen Prize. The University of Florida Press published his Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, and more recently LSU has published Moon Road: Poems 1986-2005 (2007) and Its Ghostly Workshop (2013). The Humility of the Brutes is forthcoming.
