New & Selected Poems
New poems join a selection from nearly 40 years of Hartman’s groundbreaking computer- and jazz-influenced work. Selections from five previous collections join thirty new poems, giving ample evidence of Hartman’s broad range and mastery.
Landscape with Marmots
Quasimodo Unstraps His Hump
The sky today is a blue that makes other things
petition to be compared to it,
trees that reserved judgment through half May
riot out green all over to the cheers of birds,
the sore throat and the foreign war plead valid cases
almost in vain, and the bank balance
on its short chain forgets to threaten
with customary rancor.
Supposing out at the edge of each world
the rim of darkness lies (often invading
the center, the one place
that can produce it): what gives it that lie?
The very woodchuck of last week
works her way through the high halms, now
with a dwarf double at her hungry side, aware
unconscious of the craft of foxes.
We for whom the hardest lesson is that no virtue
inheres in being uncomfortable or unhappy
may suffer on a day like this
the vertigo of a stair missed in the dark.
Easier to offer thanks for the afternoon
once we know we could not deserve it,
as when the hunter with the groundhog in his sights
decides gracefully never to have existed.