Join as we welcome our first writer in our Salon reading series on final Friday (2/23) at InkTank headquarters:
Raised in Export, PA, Eric Schwerer attended The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. After working as a carpenter in Southeastern Kentucky, Louisiana, and Ohio, he earned a PhD in Creative Writing from Ohio University. He has taught poetry to people recovering from mental illness and now teaches in the Creative Writing department at Johnstown's University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of two books of poetry, Whittling Lessons (a chapbook, Finishing Line Press) and The Saint of Withdrawal (CustomWords, 2006). His poems have been published in numerous literary journals."Eric Schwerer is a young poet with a great ear (oh so rare!), an intense 'thought-felt' intelligence, and the ability to make his poems' mysteries lucid (oh rarer still!). /The Saint of Withdrawal/ is a stunning debut." _Thomas Lux
The Saint of Withdrawal
by Eric Schwerer
It bats four times, soars,
changes course—scrapes black on the milkish air
joined by three more.
Ascending over the trees the other side of Monro Muffler Brake,
hurled claws,
sooty tissues tossed in the dirty white.
These are not
those birds you’ve seen in the moving distance
inside a daydream, slightly rising left to right,
inspiring your real eye with real flight. No. These
four have been in the dark, wet woods all night
perched in a rotten pine, standing on needles,
wings outstretched, lifted like
stooped old men in overcoats who frighten
pigeons from the park. In the weak light
two tiny dots slide on the ice of the western sky
while down on the floor these guys begin to walk,
sway and stalk, throwing forth one claw, criminal,
yoked, lurching in the quiet cold to gawk
or cock a head, moving where nothing else does
in the fog.
When Waste Management’s fleet shudders
over the township blacktop, one takes flight.
It takes it
like the sick take time, taking all the air it can
each flap, coasting until it needs again, making
dashes, strikes on the sky, hooks,
burnt matches, whatever can’t be taken back.
To learn more about the writer and to read more of his poems, visit these websites:
http://www.pitt.edu/~schwerer/Poetry.htm
http://www.custom-words.com/Schwerer.html
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