Rooftop Poetry Club - David Lampe

David Lampe

Bio:
David Lampe is a native Iowan who completed his graduate work at the University of Nebraska where he was a student of Karl Shapiro. Trained as a medievalist, he taught at Buffalo State for 37 years during which time he brought in over a 100 poets and writers to campus. He is donating a collection of over 800 books to Butler Library that show the range of those writers (English, Australian, Irish, Canadian, and American). His first collection of poems, The Trees Walked, appeared in March.

Poems:

After Cataract Surgery

They look like trees to me
but they are walking about
— Mark 8:24

And when I woke early
that August morning
birds sang

and when I stepped into
the backyard and removed
the bandage from my eye

the colors of a cardinal
flared, were crisp as he flew
from a boxwood hedge

to a forsythia bush
whose leaves of shimmering
light were a nimbus beheld

through a shudder of tears.
Yellow scales fallen,
the trees walked.

What's in a Name?

In the occluded
corner of a Dublin

snug my friends, Mont-
ague among them, ex-

plain a sore truth:
"There's trouble enough

in your name." Only
now, at 59, I learn

that going lampe
along the Liffey means

I'm loopy.
"Even so," I reply,

"where I come from
we call that being Irish."

For Joel Oppenheimer
(1926-1988)

Over ten years ago
I tried to write a tribute
to your flat reading voice
which brooked no shit
as it found in the ordinary
an occasion for singular verse.

Thinking about how
my mother embarrassed me
when I was a young boy
I asked my youngest son
when I had embarrassed him.
Without a pause he said
that I had introduced you
to his class at City Honors and it was
bad enough to have parents
who brought poets to his school, but worse,
after my introduction,
I turned to sit down
and finding no chair
sat on the floor at your feet.
He shuddered
remembering that moment.

And yet my friend, master,
I would do it again,
an act of homage.