Simon Peter Eggertsen

Night Prayer at Binh Doung +

Confirmed in the slim night shadows,
a four-toed blue and gold dragon ridges

the tiles of the moss-glazed roof, ascends
to the slivering waxed Têt moon, an off-center

A Reminder of the Diverse Particles that Form Your Identities—Ancestry in the Languageof Geography and Theoretical Physics

For my younger children So you will know, here is a recounting of the quantuminfluences, the little arcs of familiar experience thataccelerate within your own beings, tickling the protonsof personality, exciting your identities into existence,top…

LePetit Richards and the Big Dipper Carpet—An Amusement Based on a Reworking of Whittle’s Research Notes

Podcast version of this fiction piece. This was not the only time that Richards, originally born Neville Colyer, the son of a millwright in Oxfordshire, had worked through the imagery of the stars. He had…

The Moldau in a Utah Living Room

I most recall the river music. Smetana’s Moldau 

meandered often into the air at our house, 
European classical sounding in the high Utah parroquia.

Trevor at the Fountain

Armed lightly with his dark English wit, and a shade 
of amber from Woodpecker Ale, Trevor’s blue eyes glaze 
a smile as he reclines at the market fountain in Cambridge, 
just like a Roman soldier would resting in his rags after 

poetry on the ‘fridge door

my mother is madly licking 
at the languid red peach, 
screaming at life and 
the rust crush of death. 

Three-Legged Dog

An old three-legged dog, 
whiskers whitening, coat black 
as the carbon of a starless winter night, 
slowly hobbyhorses along 
the cobblestone street near the 
park green and water blue of 
Gradina Cismgiu in graying Bucharest. 

Things Missed

Every now and then I make it a point to go 
without knowing to these places, try to discover 
a view of my own, be surprised, have 
an experience uncluttered by history or the facts.
I try to imagine my way to a bit of truth or the 
answer to some awkward childhood riddle. 

Trying to Keep Quiet: A Poem Constructed Around Fragments of Leslie Norris’s “Borders”

The border I knew best as a child was halfway over 
the swinging bridge in Provo Canyon, between the shade
of Wildwood and the Sundance road, just opposite
Dr. Weight’s place. Beneath it, white-cold waters from
the diminishing glacial edges of Mt. Timpanogos fell,
jumbled along the North Fork, then moved on to mark
other boundaries further down stream. 

Putting Up the Blue Light

As children, we liked our red-carpeted front rooms best 

when the Christmas tree tossed the air with the richness
            of pinyon pine,