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Thomas Meyer

Thomas Meyer began writing as a teenager in Seattle, Washington. He was already at that age a veteran of the arts, having been a child actor, beginning at age nine, in TV ads and summer stock theater. His work with partner Jonathan Williams (1929 - 2008) on Jargon Books brought him interaction with some of the most visionary writers and artists of the 20th Century. Meyer is a poet whose books include At Dusk Iridescent (A Gathering of Poems, 1972-97) (Jargon Society, 2000), Monotypes & Tracings (Enitharmon Press, 1994), Coromandel (Skanky Possum Books, 2003), and a translation of the ancient Chinese classic Daode Jing (Flood Editions, 2006). Many of his poems and translations (including Beowulf, the I Ching, the libretto of an opera) remain unpublished. He lives in North Carolina, at the southernmost end of the Appalachians.

A poet deeply trained in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, the Germanic languages, runes, roots, herbal lore, foods, wines, gardens, astrology western and Indian, alchemy, he is never pedantic, always deft, inhabiting the world of time as gracefully as that of space.

-Robert Kelly

Thomas Meyer by David Hockney

Nepenthe

Thomas Meyer

No doubt there were prophets in Pompeii who warned of the dangers of living under volcanoes, but it is doubtful whether even the pessimists among them actually expected the total and definitive obliteration of the city.

— Eric Hobsbawn

My son eats his lunch. Takes a picture
and emails me it like the guy I had
sex with a couple weeks ago sent
a friend in the City live details of
our realizing each other.

Constance Garnett sits in her garden
and scribbles War & Peace into English.
I brought the Great Crystal. Who
can lift it much less look into it? I emptied
your ashes into the beck. The river. The sea.

Don't speak. The still point is lost to words.
My head in your hands finds it in silence.

from kintsugi:

Japanese practice of repairing ceramics
with gold laced lacquer to illuminate the breakage

Blue Memo

yellow yellow
river
for days the path could easily be found in sleep

the haze
a lake speaks
each moment a flower in an undiscovered field

somehow an afternoon god in shattered sunshine
whose handsome fate
from time to time I grow tired of

then too what I like or dislike
here we are and it is wet
abandoned

the path blocked
by scattered moonlight
trees prick the snow with shadow

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