Peggy Dobreer
    Peggy Dobreer is a poet, educator and mother, and until recently the host of the LMU poetry series.  Her new book is called In the Lake of Your Bones, about which Mariano Zaro has said, “Peggry Dobreer blends memory, meditation, nature, sensuality, and takes us to the lucid territory between intuition and wisdom, desire and surrender. The language is at the same time enigmatic and transparent.” She writes and recites with an earnest, ethereal voice, and has followed Rilke’s advice to a young poet in that she has no need for, and no time for, irony in any of its forms, so that reading her work is sometimes like walking through a picture gallery of 19th century landscape paintings, sometimes like wandering through a Hindu temple where the air is thick with an aroma of flowers and incense. For the languages and literatures of south Asia have influenced her profoundly, and in this she follows a venerable European and American tradition of looking eastward for both wisdom and solace.   


The Fabric of Man

O the obstinate plaid
the deep breath of linen
saturnalia of silk
the cornfields of cotton
pandemonium of tulle
the falsehood of polyester
pantomime of lace
the savagery of wool
caustics of vinyl
the holy shit of fine leather
compassion of bamboo
the neon colors of yarn
handspun from the discarded
saris of the aristocracy
the war of the senses
fought over the cowardice
of a camouflage jacket
an overture in the B flat
of anguish opera’s heavy
velvet curtain as it falls


This poem originally appeared in In the Lake of Your Bones (Moon Tide Press)
 


© 2012 Peggy Dobreer
Peggy Dobreer was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the September 2012
Second Sunday Poetry Series.