CELEBRATING NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, APRIL 2011 FEATURING POET ROBERT S. KING

Living Above the Frost Line celebrates NATIONAL POETRY MONTH featuring poet  Robert S. King.

There will be more posts about this southern/appalachian poet and more of his poems during the month of April. Your comments are welcome.

Robert has published in hundreds of magazines, including The Kenyon Review, Southern Poetry Review, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, Midwest Quarterly, California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Negative Capability, The Hollins Critic, Blue Unicorn, Poem, Louisville Review, En Passant, Xanadu, Chattahoochee Review, The Cape Rock, Amelia, Slant, Sow's Ear, Windless Orchard, Great River Review, Visions Inter national, Writers' Forum, Lullwater Review, Permafrost, Habersham Review, Spoon River Poetry Review,The Bridge, Hellas, Hammers, Poetpourri, Grasslands Review, Lungfish Review, and other literary magazines.

Robert S. King is a native Georgian who grew up in the rural foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He began writing poetry seriously after he was discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1972. Since then he has published several chapbooks and two full-length titles (see below).

Because poetry has never paid the bills, he has built a rather varied, and sometimes contradictory, résumé. To mention just a few jobs, he has been a Cambodian translator (U.S. Navy), a bookstore manager, a court reporter, an interlibrary loan manager, a technical editor, and a software engineer. He retired in 2010 and has been devoting himself full-time to writing, editing, and publishing poetry.

Robert is currently the Director of FutureCycle Press (www.futurecycle.org) and serves as President of the Georgia Poetry Society (www.georgiapoetrysociety.org).  Additionally, he is a member of  the Georgia Writers Association and the North Carolina Writers Network.

His chapbook titles are When Stars Fall Down as Snow (Garland Press, 1976), Dream of the Electric Eel (Wolfsong Publications, 1982), and Traveller’s Tale (Whistle Press, 1998).

Two full-length titles, The Hunted River and The Gravedigger’s Roots, were published by Shared Roads Press in 2009. 

From The Hunted River:

Regret

We are always dreaming our way back,

looking behind us to see the road

rolling up like a sleeping bag,

how the trees bend over it

as if they were trying to cover up where we’ve been.

Suddenly we feel our pulse rise like a flame,

the dust a red fire behind us.

The past burns slowly.

Its face is red.

Its gown is ash.

Cinders float from our backs and seem like travellers,

seem more than gray husks so slowly falling down.

--first published in The Habersham Review

Also from The Hunted River:

Motions

Tonight our silences walk together

in a cold slow motion

on the same abandoned road

where cricket mantras have replaced

ice clicks under logging wheels.

We go through the motions

toward thinner darkness,

our footprints deep in the road

our walks wear down.

Our feet obey the eyes navigating

a tunnel of trees bent over

a trail of ruts and holes

that could break a leg,

though we now know how to avoid a void,

we who once tried to fill the rifts

with laughing children,

with magic acts,

with house plans drawn in the dark.

Now ahead comes that distant window,

its warm hands of light

leaking out of the blinds

to touch our arrival.

But too like the cold we've come from,

a draft we name and drag in

to haunt the house,

an old wind to blow us further apart,

were we not both moths afloat

on yellow ropes of ghostlight.

We prefer to drift apart in place,

or orbit in the dark and comfort

of familiar pain, where ages hence

we may not remember our names, our lives,

if we ever truly had them,

only see how the light from our eyes ties together,

showing the way home somehow once again.

--first published by Neonbeam (U.K.)