michael o’brien

The Thread

limited edition Verge Ephemera chapbook

Drawn from a folder labeled “New Poems” and left behind when he died in November 2016, The Thread serves as both final stitch and slender guide through Michael O’Brien’s long career. Here O’Brien returns to the many forms he explored for more than fifty years—brief lyrics and flickering sequences, haiku and prose poems, translations and transcriptions of dreams—and everywhere we feel his quiet generosity and unmistakable lightness of touch.

The tip. Chevron-

print of tractor across 

field, its arrow, 

snowfall brief as dew, 

gone with first light, small 

birds glean cornstubble,

last trace in the furrows.

In these extraordinarily beautiful late poems, Michael O’Brien alights on the tiniest of presences—random hues and gestures, the print of a tractor tire, a woman boarding a bus, herbs in a window, ATMs in the dark—and finds something like eternity even if “we are / not built for eternity. It / would destroy us.” Like the artist Hammershøi “painting the rooms as / light entered them,” his poems are epics of the transient, discerning threads and streams and the patterns of lives in signs retrieved from the air and the corner of the eye. He makes a taxonomy of unexpected resemblances. Listening to everything—bars of music, lines of Rilke and Eluard and Basho, long ago conversations, words spoken in a dream, “water in distant plumbing mistaken for the telephone”—he tunes what he hears to a singular and hauntingly exact frequency. The Thread is a small book but it contains worlds.

– Geoffrey O’Brien

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