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Marc Swan
Marc's poetry imparts a cool sensibility on the everyday. Writing of small revelations and astute recollections his poems are at once both personal
and universal. Marc Swan is a vocational rehabilitation counselor living in Portland Maine whose poems have found an international audience with work published in the small press throughout the US, and in Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
publications:
in a distinct minor key
Marc Swan's brave and edgy poems keep faith, keep pushing the envelope.
Michael Laskey
Azure Night from in a distinct minor key
She flies down the gutter on her belly,
head high, bright red sleeve frayed
and snarling at the wind.
This is not a game, but a chance
encounter with a remarkable ending.
She is barely injured, a tear
in the flesh of her forearm, cracked
bone. It will mend easily
as the red sleeve. I carry
her unaware of eighty-five pounds
in my two arms to a rickety slip
where a man in a Redskins cap
jauntily tilted back off his wide
forehead greets us, directs me
to a cabin where she will rest
while he steers this ancient Chris
Craft over the tumbling water
of Puget Sound. I know his voice,
the tone, the way he says he she.
I think of his last book of poems,
sharing pages with Chekhov,
of his last ten years. Pure Gravy,
he said. And don't forget it.
From this momentary earthly
interlude he will soon return
to the infinite writing retreat
in the sky with Fante, Bukowski,
Breece D'J Pancake – to name a few.