Charles Rafferty
POETRY
Trusting a poem is our first mistake. Living as if we had not heard it is the second.
In a forest, the best poets think of axe handles and violins.
Poetry is like the moon. It can only help you see if you’re in the dark already.
A good poet is like a vulture. He relies on the tongue to tell him what has value. He takes the roadkill of August and transforms it into flight.
A poem should have meaning the way the stars have meaning—not as something explainable, but as something irrefutable.
CHARLES RAFFERTY has a new collection of prose poems from BOA, A Cluster of Noisy Planets. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review.
