A Fifth Question
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I recorded this from my mom’s guest room in New Bern, NC, where I’ve been isolating awaiting the results of a COVID test. It’s a nice room, but I ate dinner on a tray in here tonight while the family I came to visit laughed together audibly down the hall. It felt like the right place and time to record this elegy for Tomaž, a poet who continues to move me through his words and his personal, human kindness, his joy in connections. He died almost exactly seven years ago, and his presence and absence are both as palpable as these walls.
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Dan Rosenberg’s next book, Bassinet, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in February 2022. His poems are available online at the Academy of American Poets, Conjunctions, North American Review, and elsewhere. An associate professor of English at Wells College, he lives in Ithaca, NY. More at danrosenberg.us