by Joseph Stanton
Picked ginger, a glory of fragility, perfumes,
ever so briefly, a person or a room.
There are those who avoid the odor,
but for me it’s a sudden door—
discovered sometimes
on the edges of my lawn—
that opens to the sky
what the ground might be
or the other way
around.
Joseph Stanton’s books of poems are Things Seen, Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban Oahu, Cardinal Points: Poems on St. Louis Cardinals Baseball, and What the Kite Thinks: A Linked Poem (co-authored with Makoto Ōoka, Wing Tek Lum, and Jean Toyama). His sixth book of poems, Moving Pictures, is forthcoming in 2019. His poems have appeared in Hawai`i Pacific Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, New Letters, Antioch Review, Poetry East, Cortland Review, New York Quarterly, Bamboo Ridge, and many other magazines. He is a Professor of Art History and American Studies at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. He occasionally teaches poetry workshops, such as the “Starting with Art” workshops he has taught recently at Poets House in New York City and at the Honolulu Museum of Art.
