Two Poems by Joyce Sutphen

Counting My Losses

First I lost a little sleep, lost some
papers, lost the sunglasses
you gave me that were like the ones
I lost in London. That was my deal—
losing mittens, losing keys.

Then I lost interest in theories
and conundrums; I would begin
the latest article on Lacan and find
myself drifting, without whatever
it was that used to make me care.

Along the way I lost my dreams,
my hat, and the sails to the little
boat I kept in the harbor.
I lost my handwriting—which some
said was beautiful but few could read—

and then I began to lose my balance.
I lost my voice and my smile,
lost my place in the line,
in the book I was reading, lost my fear
at the airplane’s open door.

* 

Down in the Word

When we turned the corner, we were coming
into words, sprouting syllables the way

branches turn to leaf, and one of us was
humming an old song, something cool, jazzy—

the kind of song that helped us through the last
few years. This is how we began: pulling

chairs up to the table, letting the day
fall away, hearing night come slowly on,

watching words (worlds!) slide down the margins, space
between the stanzas, our breath drawn in lines

of ink, our fingers tapping paragraphs
to the sound of long riffs, tempo set by

the drum that is this room, that is this page
where you listen, playing it over now.

*

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Stearns County, Minnesota. Her first book of poetry, Straight Out of View, won the Barnard New Women’s Poets Prize Press,1995). Her second book of poems, Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and her third book, Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press, 2004), won the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Her recent books are Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), This Long Winter (Carnegie Mellon Press 2021), and That Other Life (2023). She served as the Minnesota Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2021, succeeding Robert Bly, and she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.