Tim Suermondt’s sixth full-length book of poems A Doughnut And The Great Beauty Of The World came out in 2023 from MadHat Press. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Smartish Pace, The Fortnightly Review, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

 

KEEPING AT IT

While my wife works

on her poetic sequence

I scribble lines



not even worthy of scribbles.

I step outside, walk around,

taking in everything: sun and sky,



streets, buildings and people,

hoping the immersion

gets me back on track. I decide



to buy my wife a rose,

yellow to match her favorite umbrella.

After she says “This is beautiful”



I’ll go back to my writing,

more scribbles today not the end

of the world, after all. And the rose,



no longer an orphan, has a poem or two

in it I can steal, tomorrow maybe,

make them mine and for everyone.

THE LIBRARY ONCE

Humanity is taking its lumps now,

but then it always has—

I button my coat and pass through

the long alleyway, the confetti

of snowflakes beginning to fall

as I use the shortcut 

to be one of the first at the tables,

checking something only history

claims it has the answer for. People

continue to do the worst,

but also continue to do the best—

I have my pen and paper

in my coat pocket, promising to do

justice with the morning’s time.

THROUGH A GLASS BRIGHTLY

On this cold afternoon I watch the seventh

and eighth graders file onto the yellow school buses.



When I was their age and rode the yellow buses

I sat as often as I could beside Maria who had an enormous



interest in crocodiles, stating facts like gospel:

“Crocodiles can motor almost twenty miles an hour



and they have ostheoderms.” I gushed at how much she knew

about crocodiles, given how little I knew about anything



or so I felt. The crocodiles faded the day her family moved,

but I pride myself still on remembering the ostheoderms—



we could all use some as we move forward, and back 

in memory, the future waiting for whatever we may bring



to complete our story, this life of mine on a city bus

now sitting with my wife, listening to her fearless knowledge.