The fourth and final in our series featuring poems by Ed Skoog with photographs by J. Robert Lennon.  Read the first, and Ed’s introduction to the series, here.

Photo J. Robert Lennon

Space

wants to be held away
from its surface, between shape and place.

Looking for solace, do I walk or drift?
For protection, I wear a soup pot.

When I call out sweet, when I try
to get it alone, late and talking

in the pool light glow. Across midnight’s
white tile floor, like cough medicine,

or the grass stains on her rugby shirt.
In dark basement, saying her name

toward the vernal scent of vetiver.
Sacked city we are fleeing, bright on our backs.

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Ed Skoog‘s first collection of poems, Mister Skylight, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Poetry.  He has been a Bread Loaf Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the Richard Hugo House and George Washington University.  He lives in Seattle and teaches at Everett Community College.

J. Robert Lennon is a novelist and photographer living in Ithaca, NY.  He teaches writing at Cornell University.

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More work by Ed Skoog appears in the Fall/Winter 2010-11 (v5.n2) issue of Poetry Northwest.