Nelson Rodney: One Poem

Nelson Rodney

Rodney Nelson was born in Fargo, North Dakota, and raised there and in the Pacific Northwest. He did not pursue an academic calling but spent certain key years in San Francisco during the “hippie” era. His poetry began appearing in mainstream literary print journals (e.g., Georgia Review) in 1970, and a few chapbooks appeared under his byline. Nelson then turned to fiction and did not write a poem for twenty-two years, restarting in the electronic journals during the 2000s. See his entry in the Poets & Writers directory. He has worked as book and copy editor and licensed psychiatric technician and has returned to his hometown in the Great Plains.

TOWN IN PLACE

I had come here in a fit of mistake
wooing a one that would not see me and
a later one that merely did but I
was not returning for either of them

or to visit the kitchen of a man
waiting out age in a town that pleased him
who had raised me not here or anywhere
and sat to the quiet end long ago

it did not have a nimbus now but a
clarity that made the town seem slow or
even unmoving and when I drove through
I tired too of exaggeration

I came to look at an egret tree and
they were just in it and there at the lake
and orioles in another one were
only themselves on a uncloudy day