Peter Kline
—
A View of Spring
-after Tu Fu’s “Spring Landscape,” trans. David Hinton
Sprouts of DroughtGard® corn spike the nuclear pasture.
It must be spring again. The abandoned cities
glisten with deadly loot and sudden stars.
Armed caravans pursue the memory of goose.
What soldiers might do next makes the drug dealers fat.
Lovers trade gossip but keep the news to themselves.
The bunker’s diode light is terrible
for my complexion––who will flirt with me now?
Late Valentine
Nothing matters, I’m sure. Then you go away.
No one puts their cold feet on me in bed
and I can’t complain about it.
The earth is dying. I want to send you socks.
Peter Kline is the author of two poetry collections, Mirrorforms (Parlor Press) and Deviants (SFASU Press). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has also received residency fellowships from the Hemingway House, Amy Clampitt House, and James Merrill House, and has won the Morton Marr Prize from Southwest Review, the River StyxInternational Poetry Prize, and The Columbia Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure, and the Persea anthology of self-portrait poems, More Truly and More Strange. Since 2012 he has directed the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon. He teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University, and can be found online at www.peterklinepoetry.com
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