Robert Wrigley: Indolence

Robert Wrigley

Robert Wrigley was born February 27, 1951, in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up in Collinsville, a coal mining town. He received his B.A. (with honors) in English Language & Literature at Southern Illinois University in 1974, and his M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Montana in 1976, where he studied with Madeline DeFrees, John Haines, and Richard Hugo. His collections of poetry include Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); Lives of the Animals (2003); Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and Lenore Marshall Award finalist; What My Father Believed (1991); Moon in a Mason Jar (1986); and The Sinking of Clay City (1979).

Indolence

Under the grape arbor, sunlight’s warmer than skin,
                  the breeze is cool enough
to balance it out, and the bird songs are all
                  beautiful, not raucous but sweet.
The sway of the hammock also helps,
                  and her leg draped across his as she sleeps —
though it has brought about a tingling in his toes,
                  a general numbness in his calf, and a prickle
in his knee — doesn’t cause him much discomfort yet,
                  although a cloud’s blowing by in the shape
of something he cannot quite make out,
                  and to the right, a bunch of grapes dangles
so juice-engorged they look to be in pain