Randall R. Freisinger

Those Who Can, Do

"Be one upon whom nothing is lost:"
This bit of Henry James just one
of the many small pills of wisdom
I've dispensed to students for too many years.
"Wake up!" I have shouted, striking
my desk, assuring them Thoreau
would have done likewise were he there
to lend visual force to his wish
that they stop snoozing their lives away.
Term after term I have warned them
ad nauseam how in poems rain and wind
are seldom simple scenic bits of weather
for verisimilitude's sake, that they are visible
signs of the indiscernible, workings of mystery
and grace on souls in need of breath and drink.
Whey then, this morning, have I dozed
all morning over a blank page, as mired
as the Ancient Mariner upon his painted ocean,
dull as the brain of the poet himself,
crippled by opium, while a summer rain
spatters my window and a vast wind
fills the maples' sail, the house strains
at its moorings, and I, so at ease sailing
the shimmering seas of others, have no strength
to free my lines and cast off from this dock.

Contributor Bio

Randall R. Freisinger's poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Tendril, New Letters, The Laurel Review, The Chariton Review, Passages North, Interim, The Milkweed Chronicle, The Nebraska Review, Poet & Critic,  Zone 3, The Cream City  Review, Tar River Poetry, The Atlanta Review, Green Mountains Review, The Marlboro Review, The South Carolina Review, and Black Warrior Review. His work has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and has been included in various anthologies. He has three books of poems in print, and a fourth is scheduled for release in October of 2009.  Plato's Breath won the 1997 May Swenson Award from Utah State University Press. He lives, teaches, and writes in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.