Theater of Memory, New and Selected Poems of Mark Perlberg will be published posthumously by Louisiana State University Press in the fall of 2012. The book will include poems written toward the end of his life in 2008, as well as selections from his earlier books.

Three previously unpublished poems from Theater of Memory will appear in the Spring issue of Prairie Schooner, published by the University of Nebraska.

This month's poem from Theater of Memory

The End of the Holidays

We drop you at O’Hare with your young husband,
two slim figures under paradoxical signs:
United and Departures. The season’s perfect oxymoron.
Dawn is a rumor, the wind bites, but there are things
fathers still can do for daughters.
Off you go looking tired and New Wave
under the airport’s aquarium lights,
with your Coleman cooler and new, long coat,
something to wear to the office and to parties
where down jackets are not de rigeur.
Last week winter bared its teeth.
I think of summer and how the veins in a leaf
come together and divide
come together and divide.
That’s how it is with us now
as you fly west toward your thirties.
I set my new cap at a nautical angle, shift
baggage I know I’ll carry with me always
to a nether hatch where it can do only small harm,
haul up fresh sail and point my craft
toward the punctual sunrise.