The Writer's Voice Series proudly presents local poet and CSU, Chico Emeritus Professor George Keithley on Thursday, November 13, at 7:30 p.m., in the University Center Lounge. Widely published, Keithley has had the pleasure of seeing his award-winning epic, The Donner Party, adapted as both an opera and a stage play. A collection of his poems, Song in a Strange Land, has received the Di Castagnola Award from The Poetry Society of America. In The American Poetry Review Joyce Carol Oates has written that Keithley "seems to possess Whitman's visionary imagination. Poetry that is both musically haunting and intellectually rigorous is rare, indeed, and Keithley's achievement is nothing like any poetry that is being written today." Keithley will read from his latest collection, Living Again, published by Bear Star Press. He writes full time and is currently at work on new poems and short stories.
The Sea
It is a human sharing in the rhythm of the sea
and the moon
and animal breeding
and the stars.
—Ernesto Cardenal, Love
Helpless her hands lose hold, slip away.
As though night hides an undertow
which lifts her warm weight on its arm.
Along the dark she drifts
out of sight—
A solid sea-wall divides the surf
from the shore splashed with rocks.
When the man wades out to find her
the moon pulls up its anchor.
It slides free of the tide—
The hull of his soul sails on
the sky, his body is a buoy
in the black seams of the waves.
A drunken crew dances on the deck.
In sleep we float far apart. Voyage
in different dreams that wreck
in the wind. And fear
death in the deep bed. Then swim
toward land. Birdsong. The blue scent
of wild lilac. Suddenly here we stand
on the stones of consciousness, shining, short of breath—
from Living Again