April 13
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	elizabeth robinson
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	EXIT
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	Pollen rains down on us. Slick days of fragrance excite our praise for the growing shoot as it exits its earth. Weak efforts burr the flesh and force creatures to speak of how their limbs move out from trunks. They recall that the petal departs its stem, so willing to fall like a foot from a legless man. That's how we discard the slow fecundity of color, so weedy that the seed doesn't know its root. How will the season confess its fruit? The fruit repeats. A mate for emptiness is not the hollow thing. So full. Departures undermined by sap retrace their growth by arms and branches, arching out in kind. (From Inaudible Trumpeters, 2007)
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	about the poem
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	This poem resulted in some ways from a formal experiment: I took the title of an Edwin Arlington Robinson poem and the line-end words and then put my poetry in his formal structure. But the content came to reflect my own preoccupations. Hence, I was thinking about my father's illness and how he lost a leg even as I was reflecting on my young children (that is, they were young at that time!). So the overall sense of the poem came to be about regeneration and how we exit one form or incarnation or way of life and stretch ourselves beyond old boundaries into new experience and terrain.
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	about the poet
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	Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several books of poetry. Her most recent book, Inaudible Trumpeters, employs titles and line-end rhymes from the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, with her own text interpolated to create new poems. Robinson is the recipient of a 2008 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artist Award. She lives in Boulder and teaches at Naropa University.
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