I’ve been reading a bit of Thomas Lux’s poems this past week. He is going to be at two upcoming events in January and February that I am attending so thought I’d sit with some of his work. I like his mix of reality and fantasy, how he straddles these two worlds with a kind of sad, angry, compassionate humor. I know that sounds contradictory, but I believe we can inhabit all these emotions at the same time, in fact, it’s more the norm (and really healthier when we do), than having a singular emotion powering our outlook. He goes for irony in a big way and  dips often into a wry look at how society functions as in his poem You Go to School to Learn.

You go to school to learn to
read and add, to someday
make some money. It—money—makes
sense: you need
a better tractor, an addition
to the gameroom, you prefer
to buy your beancurd by the barrel.
Three’s no other way to get the goods
you need. Besides, it keeps people busy
working—for it.
It’s sensible and, therefore, you go
to school to learn (and the teacher,
having learned, gets paid to teach you) how
to get it. Fine. But:
you’re taught away from poetry
or, say, dancing (That’s nice, dear,
but there’s no dough in it). No poem
ever bought a hamburger, or not too many. It’s true,
and so, every morning—it’s still dark!—
you see them, the children, like angels
being marched off to execution,
or banks. Their bodies luminous
in headlights. Going to school.

I like where he wanders with his poetry, speaking of the everyday, examining how we go about life and what’s beneath the surface of what we say and do, as individuals, families and societies. His poems feel relaxed and sure of themselves in a offhand way–not with a lot of puffing up or "I’ve got it all figured out." Here’s one more of his poems from Split Horizon, published in 1994. I’ve recorded both these poems and one more, The Perfect God.

 A Streak of Blood that
Once was a Tiny Red Spider

is all there is left of it which walked
down the page of a book
and which I meant only to brush away
but crushed
to this minuscule skid mark—4 mm high, ½ mm wide: baby
red scar, somewhat askew

hyphen forever
on page 211 of Lost Tribes and Promised Lands.
It had many legs—it was moving fast.
Some version of a heart must have been in there.
Some sensory talents.
Descending down a page,

little literate one, you came to the end of your page,
and thus published
I close your tomb to a sound
I love—hollow, soft: whump,
and give it back to a shelf
and again, someday, I hope, a reader.