The Amulet
Book summary
The Amulet by Gerry Eugene offers a vivid collection of poems that explore diverse aspects of life, from nature's landscapes to personal experiences of love, friendship, and identity. Through his powerful use of language, Eugene portrays the essence of the world around us, celebrating its beauty and complexity.
Excerpt from The Amulet
The Amulet
I saw the child
search the rat’s corpse for bones
then work the ivory
into an objet d’art.
I bought it
not for his wonderful lies
about this artifact
a tourist should desire
nor the fact he was
inspired by starvation,
but for his utility in transformation,
his ability to work with what was there.
1974
When You Wait for Biopsy Results,
you hear the green buzz of life
you wear questions like coats hats gloves
you speak with a voice pitched too sharp
when you wait like that
your eyes do not really see the road
on the way to the clinic
when you wait in the lobby
you can't hold onto the magazine
you can't quite see the doctors
and when they tell you
words you knew they would say
in low voices like this
and you walk out to the car
and fall behind the wheel
you can't think of where to drive
you can't dream of where to live
1998
Water Passages (1993)
When I was young I fell in love with you,
and learned to chant, and learned to delete lines
best left unsaid. Teacher, the years swept by,
foaming and falling to the valley's floor.
I was a small stream bed that carried verse:
hiker's boots stepped over me and stayed dry.
But these currents carry your soft vespers
still, as well as songs from other creeks and springs.
Seventeen years the river took to grow
and flow past here, far from those headwaters.
That nascent inspiration, rivulet,
is as much the river of my days now,
Louise, as any major confluence
that floods the memories on to the gulf.
(In memoriam Louise Glück, 1943–2023)
Sudden
The meeting of cornfield
and river valley forms
a straight, fenced line
that we walked on evenings
for the sudden replications
of stars, and to talk
about distant city lights
that lit the sky north of Otho.
When you died I could not cry
for a time, but then your memory
caught me, and your fatherly
nod took me from a dark place:
as when we had walked, Papa,
suddenly to a great expanse
marked by a cardinal direction
and washed in tears and light.
1978
Praesent id libero id metus varius consectetur ac eget diam. Nulla felis nunc, consequat laoreet lacus id.