Newsletter sign up

Be the first to know when new American Life in Poetry columns are live.

Column 697

No Encore

Intro by Ted Kooser
07.29.2018

For me, poet­ry’s most mov­ing sub­ject is imper­ma­nence, and I will nev­er read too many poems about it, each with their own very per­son­al and spe­cif­ic points of view. Bet­ty Adcock of North Car­oli­na is one of the Amer­i­can South’s most dis­tin­guished poets and teach­ers, and this poem is from her new book from Louisiana Uni­ver­si­ty Press, Rough Fugue.

No Encore

I'm just an assistant with the Vanishing Act.
My spangled wand points out the disappeared.
It's only a poor thing made of words, and lacks
the illusive power to light the darkling year.
 
Not prophecy, not elegy, but fact:
the thing that's gone is never coming back.
 
Late or soon a guttering silence will ring down
a curtain like woven smoke on thickening air.
The audience will strain to see what's there,
the old magician nowhere to be found.
 
For now, I wear a costume and dance obliquely.
The applause you hear is not for me, its rabid sound
like angry rain—as one by one the known forms cease to be:
childhood, the farm, the river, forested ground;
the tiger and the condor, the whale, the honeybee;
the village, the book, the lantern. Then you. Then me.

Share this column

Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2017 by Betty Adcock, "No Encore," from Rough Fugue, (Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Poem reprinted by permission of Betty Adcock and the publisher.   Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.