Status Updates From Selected Poems of Derek Wal...

...autumn's acclimation of a world
flashing with its deciduous poetry
from Tiepolo's Hound p 277

....faster
than a mine shaft caving in
I can see the black hole
we have made of heaven

p193 from the poem water lamps

I had felt like changing my name...
Instead, I'd kept up the game
of pretending whoever I was,
or am, or will be, are the same.

from the poem The Arkanses Testament p198

giving gives us back the right to laugh...

from the Spoiler's Return p150

You prepare for one sorrow,
but another comes.
It is not like the weather,
you cannot brace yourself,
the unreadiness is all.

from the poem Oddjob, a Bull Terrier p120

and either I'm nobody or a nation
...I loved them my children, my wife, my home.
I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them....p128
from the poem the schooner Flight

....The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility
will never finish and has been the same....

from the poem Sea Grapes p97

But even if I love not him but the world,
and the wonder of the world in him, of him in the world,
and the wonder that he makes the world waken to me,
I shall never grow old in him,
I shall always be morning to him

p78 from the collection Another Life