Landis Everson

Landis Everson lives in San Luis Obispo, California. A collection, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005, edited by Ben Mazer, will be published by Graywolf in the autumn.

Two Poems

Landis Everson, 5 January 2006

Poet’s Pepper Tree

Because I never wrote it, your poem is better than mine. Your birds have more colour. Their songs climb up the down branches of tall, weeping trees the way clever birds might if that was their reason.

They eat peppers pink in their beaks. The wind ruffles their vanity. Right next to the scribbled sheets of green spaces you wrote to melancholy, my joy erupts like a...

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