April 2nd, 2009
Peter Everwine
Peter Everwine has been a member of the Fresno arts community since he came here to teach in the early 1960’s. He retired from CSUF in 1992, but he has remained in Fresno and continues to be a productive poet.
Everwine has published seven collections of poetry, including Collecting the Animals, which won the Lamont Poetry Prize. His From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems was published in 2004.
Aside from his own poems, Peter has also been a sterling translator of poems from the Hebrew, and his translations of ancient Aztec poems have provided a unique insight into that culture. His first book of Aztec translations was In the House of Light, published in 1969. A new and very much expanded edition of Aztec poems, Working the Song Fields, will appear in the spring of 2009 from Eastern Washington University Press.
In the Last Days
In the last days of my father’s illness
he lived on, separate from us, in a tiny room
with a window in it, where we could look in and watch
him laboring at his heavy sleep.
And only once did he startle up
from the pillow, wide eyed, and slapped one palm
across the other—Phsst! he said, and smiled, and shook his head
as if in disbelief down into sleep again.
I don’t know what my father saw then, wandering
in some mazy episode of time.
That was forty years ago. Forty years, like yesterday.
Almost his own age now, I can see
his face before me: his wry smile of wonder,
as if something had leapt up underfoot
in the dark and sped away
as he watched.
