CasaChapBio

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  • An accomplished classical guitarist, lover of all things Joan of Arc and late night scholar of Henry David Thoreau, poet Troy Casa, has lived in wonderfully strange places like Reno, Nevada, Gahanna, Ohio and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, all the while, poem writing. Currently, he lives with his partner "George" and their two sons, Keats & Kincaide, in Merrimack, New Hampshire. :
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TSRTST

  • The Stark Realities that Surround Texas, printed at Wordrunner Chapbooks in Petaluma, California, is available through the author. Please send check or money order for $10 [includes S&H] to: Troy Casa, 5 Orchard Hills Parkway, Bangor, ME. 04401.:
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“Cutting Tracks” was recently awarded Third Prize in the Merrimack Public Library 2008 Poetry Contest. The Union Leader, a Manchester-based newspaper, included a version of the work in the Friday, April 25th Merrimack edition (and a really horrible photo of the poet!).

Cutting Tracks

Each of us

a rivulet

      the one-night offspring of Poseidon

and a water nymph,

shaped from the soot and sod of cities

some       get bent by heroin and car wrecks

then dumped near a pier at the old north shore

others    flush the gills of carp in Kyoto gardens

or feed earth’s eternal talismans

                                                    icebergs and estuaries

either way,

                             archaeology cares little for our victories

                                                                our peccadillos

cares little from what direction we came

                                                        or went

Each of us simply goes

                                               by greater force

cutting tracks.

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Special thanks to Tom Lyford of Dover-Foxcroft, Maine for his editorial guidance on this work.

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A Hard & Noble Patience

by David St. John

 

There is a hard & noble patience

I admire in my friends who are dead

Though I admit there are none of them

I would change places with

 

For one thing look how poorly they dress

 

Only one is still beautiful

& that is because

She chose to drown herself in a Swiss lake

fed by a glacier said in local myth

to be a pool of the gods

 & when her body was found she was so

Preserved by the icy currents

That even her eyelashes seemed to quiver

Beneath my breath

 

Though that was only for an instant

 

Before she was strapped to a canvas stretcher

& loaded into a blue van

Soon I was the only person still standing

At the lake’s edge A man made lonely

By such beauty

 
A man with less than perfect faith in any God.

 

from Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems.

Harper:

New York

, 1994

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CasaChap1

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  • "Casa's work has continued to impress me with its ability to weave together disjointed images and symbols, creating a cohesive and complex tapestry of emotions. The emotional space of the first line becomes an entryway with an unknown destination. It is his unpredictability with imagery that keeps me interested." --Alissa Hall: