Poem in Thanks

Thomas Lux

(1946 - 2017)

Poem in Thanks

Lord Whoever, thank you for this air I'm about to in- and exhale,

this hutch in the woods, the wood for fire,

the light- both lamp and the natural stuff

of leaf-back, fern, and wing.

For the piano, the shovel

for ashes, the moth-gnawed

blankets, the stone-cold water

stone-cold: thank you.

Thank you, Lord, coming for

to carry me here- where I'll gnash

it out, Lord, where I'll calm

and work, Lord, thank you

for the goddamn birds singing!

The poet expresses thanks for a wide range of things. Some would be common to many people. I’m not sure of “the goddamn birds singing” but maybe them, too. Lux's fine poem "A Little Tooth" was part of our Poetry Month some years ago. It can be found on the Poetry Telos website or just with a quick Google.

About the poet: Acclaimed poet and teacher Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1946 to working class parents. He attended Emerson College and the University of Iowa. He began publishing haunted, ironic poems that owed much to the Neo-surrealist movement in the 1970s. Critically lauded from his first book Memory’s Handgrenade (1972), Lux’s poetry gradually evolved toward a more direct treatment of immediately available, though no less strange, human experience. Often using ironic or sardonic speakers, startlingly apt imagery, careful rhythms, and reaching into history for subject matter, Lux created a body of work that is at once simple and complex, wildly imaginative and totally relevant.