PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Sue Ellen Thompson

PoetryMagazine.com

Sue Ellen Thompson
USA

Sue Ellen Thompson’s poems have been read on National Public Radio by Garrison Keillor, have been featured in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated newspaper column, and have received numerous awards, including the 1986 Samuel French Morse Prize, the 2003 Pablo Neruda Prize, and two Individual Artist’s Grants from the State of Connecticut. She is the author of four books, most recently The Leaving: New & Selected Poems (Autumn House, 2001) and The Golden Hour (Autumn House, 2006), both of which were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2005), a selection from the work of 94 American poets that is now being used in college classrooms across the country.

Sue Ellen has taught poetry at Middlebury College, Wesleyan University, Binghamton University, Central Connecticut State University and the University of Delaware. She has given readings throughout New England, as well as at the National Arts Club in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and Galway University in Ireland . She was the 1998 poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH , and participated for 13 summers in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont.

After spending most of her adult life in Mystic, CT, Thompson moved in late 2006 to the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake. She is now teaching at The Writers’ Center in Bethesda and tutoring adult poets. In January 2010, the Maryland Library Association selected her as the winner of its prestigious Maryland Author Award, which is given to a poet every four years for his or her body of work.

Happiness

When we were young, it came to us
unbidden, slipping its weightless arm
around our shoulders, urging us toward
the light that shimmered all around. Remember
the paneled bedroom of our first
apartment? We’d just come from
the beach, my day-glo orange bikini
radiating, still, a kind of heat.
You spread me on a mattress
thinly buttered by a sheet, and when I rose
again, it wasn’t with the weight of flesh
but like the gauzy curtain, billowed
by the wind, through which we glimpsed
the mower’s progress through the tresses
of the next-door-neighbor’s lawn.

In middle age, it has a heft to it
and something chilly at the margins,
like a good fur coat whose satin lining
shoots a warning down the sleeve. Each time
I feel its husk begin to stir in me,
I think of how the sun, in just a few years,
turned that flimsy drape to dust. That’s
why people cry at weddings, isn’t it? Because
the happy couple’s happiness is something
we have all been lofted by, just as we’ve seen
the mower, intent upon his work.

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credit: poems from The Golden Hour, (Autumn House Press, 2006)