Restless
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
—Matthew Arnold, “The Buried Life”
It’s not that I’m without rest, it seems,
But that I don’t want any, migrating
From the sofa and the newsless paper
To the chair and the book and back again.
It’s not even all I’ve failed to finish
Or start, not the unanswered letters,
Stiff little sentinels of guilt. Not
The abandoned books like dead birds
Splayed face down on every table.
Not the leak that’s turning the shelf
Beneath the sink to an oatmeal swag,
Nor the gutter so clogged it bleeds
A tannic plasma each time it rains,
Though, I admit, the piles festering
In the domestic subconscious of garage
And desk are suffi cient to distraction.
On my third snack-raid this hour, I hear
My mother’s voice chiding from the center
Of another summer Sunday afternoon:
“Boredom is a lack of imagination!”
Well, it’s not that, Mom, but the lack
Of direction, because when I imagine
It’s all that I’m not doing, and,
When I do it, it’s not what I imagined.
Nothing for it but to keep on trudging
Until the compass needle spins at the Pole,
All headings then equivocally equal,
No choice but to bed the snow and rest.
From For the Lost Boys, Ghost Road Press 2006About the authorJeffrey Franklin teaches Victorian literature nd creative writing at the University of Colorado at Denver.Links to reviews
Great American Pinup, January 2007; Edward Byrne, March 2007
Featured Poet: Poetry Daily April 20 2007
Blurbs: “Jeffrey Franklin’s richly textured imagination builds lines that are richly textured with sheer recalcitrant knowledge—knowledge that, in Franklin’s deft hands, lifts, with seeming ease, into a wide range of poetries—lyric, story, satire, protest, celebration, and inquiry. For the Lost Boys is remarkably accomplished and compelling from beginning to end.” —Andrew Hudgins, author of Ecstatic in the Poison
“These richly descriptive poems, often telling stories of the South and the West, are the careful accumulations of an assimilative mind. Jeff rey Franklin can juxtapose a paintball game to a real war, write of a self “far from purified,” or ask of a clown, “How many decades can a man sham wonder?” Yet this array of landscapes, characters, and experiences feels braided into the soul of an acute observer, an artist upon whom nothing is lost. Franklin understands
The way living is punctuated only
by intermittent atolls of lucidity,
the rest spent coasting the vast
connective ocean of distraction
and day-dream, sleep and reverie.
With its textured vision of reality and imagination, For the Lost Boys is a solid achievement, a welcome debut.” —David Mason, author of Arrivals and Ludlow
“In their elegant always lucid surfaces, Jeff Franklin’s poems address the most serious responsibilities of adulthood, of the cost of being a citizen, husband, and father. He is enough of a southerner for history and place to be important, yet he is, at the core, a Romantic, a songwriter, storyteller, and joker. Each poem falls like a tracer that reveals a compassionate and intelligent life. Playful at times, fearless in approach and resolve, For The Lost Boys is a first book to mark.” —Rodney Jones, author of Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005
