Thank You

Thank You

By Ira Sadoff

 

Why not a meadow?

Why not a little clearing and a stream

to wade in? Why not take our pants off,

a little respite from our partners

who couldn’t see us, who’d never see us

no matter what we did? What we did was wrong,

the way we did it. It was miraculous, 

it took hold long after

we trudged back to our spouses. 

So many years harboring a secret. 

Thank you for telling me 

about growing up in Queens, daddy’s 

milk truck skittering about Northern Boulevard 

looking for your favorite ice cream. 

And the darkness: how shades were drawn,

how your mother would never recover

from your father. How many of us 

have been stymied by those early dramas

until we married them? So many years, 

so many hungry years after. 

Thank you for the apricots in the mail,

thank you more for appearing at my door

with so little time left: no going back

to field our regrets. Old

as we are, you are here and now,

why not a meadow and a clearing?

 

 

About this Poem

 

“This poem was inspired by the pleasure of a long, deep friendship. Unmediated intimacy, with its concomitant trust and pleasure in another person, is a rare and treasured gift—even more so if it survives our histories and passionate mistakes. The poem aspires to give texture to that journey, to those feelings.”—Ira Sadoff

 

 

About the Poet

 

Ira Sadoff was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 7, 1945, of Russian-Jewish ancestry. He earned a BA in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University in 1966 and an MFA from the University of Oregon in 1968.

 

In 1975, Sadoff published his first collection of poetry, Settling Down (Houghton Mifflin). Since then, he has published several poetry collections, most recently Country, Living (2020), True Faith (2012), and Barter (2003), which delves into his personal past, specifically concerning love and bereavement, as well as the historical and global past, referencing Beethoven, Vietnam, and the fall of Communism. Other recent collections include Grazing (1998), which included poems that were awarded the American Poetry Review’s Leonard Shestack Prize, the Pushcart Poetry Prize, and the George Bogin Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America; Emotional Traffic(1989); A Northern Calendar (1981), which charts the arrival and passage of the seasons; and Palm Reading in Winter (1978).

 

About Sadoff’s work, the poet Gerald Stern has said, “Nowhere else in American poetry do I come across a passion, a cunning, and a joy greater than his. And a deadly accuracy. I see him as one of the supreme poets of his generation.” On awarding Sadoff the Bogin Memorial Prize, the poet Alan Shapiro said,

Beyond the energetic syntax and the astonishing range of idiom and tone, what I so admire in these poems is the just yet always unpredictable weaving together of individual and collective life, the insightful, almost seamless integration of personal experience in all its unredemptive [sic] anguish with the heterogeneous realities of American culture.

Sadoff is also the author of three works of prose, most recently History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture (2009), which, through the work of poets like Czesław Miłosz and Frank O’Hara, argues that poets live and write within history; An Ira Sadoff Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1992), a collection of stories, poems, and essays about contemporary poetry; and Uncoupling (1982), a novel.

 

Sadoff is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1973, he was a fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and in 1974, he was the Alan Collins Fellow in Poetry and Prose at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poetry has been widely anthologized, most recently in The Best American Poetry Series, in 2008.

 

Sadoff has served as poetry editor of the Antioch Review and was cofounder of the Seneca Review. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in the MFA programs at the University of Virginia and Warren Wilson College. He previously served as the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.