All the doors of my house burst open at once! 
Kabir twirls in beating a hand drum. 
Walt is shouting lines so long he’s turning blue & about to faint. 
Sylvia waits until she’s sure I’m watching 
then sighs & sighs & starts a fire 
on the corner 
of my bed. 

& there’s a whole parade now: Blake, Coleridge, the Beats, 
Surrealists, Imagists, & the Modernists; Langston Hughes & I make 
a break for it as Homer fills & shatters the door frame, with his gigantic 
head & shoulders & 

A huge wind sweeps everyone & the furniture tumbling and rolling 
out on the lawn, & the windows are sparkles in the grass 
& I’m stumbling & running for the tree-line three states away & 10,000 
feet up & the horse hooves are pounding the baked drum of the earth 
& gaining on me from behind when suddenly I’m in silence, 
in a dark yellow cloud of dust, alone. 

—An earlier version of this poem appeared in the 30/30 Project at Tupelo Press (July 2024).

Thomas A. Thomas

was born in Illinois to a medical-doctor mother and a ballet-dancer father, and spent a lot of time off by himself in the woods, prairies, and fields, day and night, in all seasons. Thomas found his way to the University of Michigan (U.M.), where he studied with Donald Hall, and Gregory Orr, and workshopped some poems with Robert Bly. He won Minor and Major Hopwood Awards in Poetry, and his poem “Approaching Here” was choreographed and performed at U.M.

Thomas worked as Detroit Correspondent for a St. Louis-based Rock and Jazz magazine, Concert News, covering many of the major acts of the mid-1970s. After a couple of years of madness in New York City in the late Seventies, he camped his way west to Washington state, where he has happily made his home for more than 40 years. He now serves as a Board Member for the Olympia Poetry Network, and is active in numerous online poetry and photography groups.

His poems, photographs, and video recordings appear in print and online, most recently in The Banyan Review, Blue Heron Review, Cirque Journal, FemAsia Magazine, Gyroscope Review, and Vox Populi, as well as in English-language anthologies and in translation to Spanish, Serbian, and Bengali. In 2022, his work was nominated for Best of the Net and for the Pushcart Prize.

Thomas is the author of Getting Here (Trafford Publishing, 2005), a collection of poems and photography; and My Heart Is Not Asleep (MoonPath Press, 2024), poems that delicately reconstruct moments from a decade of caring for his wife, as she gradually succumbs to early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Poet’s website: https://thomas-a-thomas.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ On Being Astonished and Capturing the Sight in a Poem, an interview of Thomas A. Thomas by Karen Hugg (8 May 2019).

(Hugg, pronounced “hewg,” is a professional horticulturist and writer of literary mysteries and nonfiction articles about plants. Her most recent book, published in 2022, is Leaf Your Troubles Behind: How to Destress and Grow Happiness Through Plants.)