Robert Hill Long was raised in coastal North Carolina, and educated at Davidson College and the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers.
He helped found the North Carolina Writers network in 1984 and was its first director. He is the author of 5 books: The Power to Die (Cleveland State 1987), The Work of the Bow (Cleveland State 1997), The Effigies (Plinth Books 1998), The Kilim Dreaming (Bear Star Press 2010) and The Wire Garden (Arlo Press 2010). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Zyzzyva, Manoa, Chelsea, New England Review, Poetry, The Prose Poem, Sentence, Seneca Review, Green Mountains Review, Flash Fiction and Best American Poetry. He has been awarded fellowships from the NEA (1988, 2005), the Oregon Arts Commission (1997) and the North Carolina Arts Council (1986). He won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize in 1995, the War Poem Prize in 2009 and 2004, Virginia Quarterly Review’s Balch Prize in 1999, and the 2010 Dorothy Brunsman Prize for a collection by a poet living West of the Plains. He taught creative writing for 20 years at Clark University, the University of Oregon, and Penn State. He is now a faculty research administrator at the University of Oregon.
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A Lake in the Cascades
In sleep he woke to his father on a train,
in a blue suit and barefoot, unsurprisingly
happy to meet like this, nodding with warmth
but not rising for grief’s embrace. I’m fine,
he said, and their odd trip faded to black.
Sometimes the son—silverheaded now—rewinds
this reel to test the glow of happiness
it radiated. Wasn’t it a fake,
a bedtime story his unsleeping self told
as balm? As son, he had not been the best
or better, merely good. That chance was past.
Each day he rows on a lake so clear he sees
the bottom everywhere. His father’s face
smiles from a stone down there and will not surface.
A Summons
Steller’s jays address the world in a bark
harsh as a hatchet on green wood. Only when
they’re at ease do they sing in the sword fern
and devil’s club. So he thanked his luck
to have spilled trail mix on the path down
to the tent, when the blue body with indigo crest
cleaned up his mess and followed it with a hymn
for his ears only. And then, amazingly, he heard
a sermon that inhabited silence:
Give all you can spare to all who have less.
And saw that he’d packed far too much to feed
his retreat, and understood he had license
to give much away. On a stump he watched the jay
and ravens and chipmunks take his tithes away.
The Eddy
Perpetuity. What a joke. His name
will be a stone for lichen to eat. And all he told
his wife to remember a bigger joke
now that the laser-cut grooves of her name
require the steel brush of his attention.
Evening sun incises his glass of wine
on the back deck above the river.
Like the red incision beneath her breast. Like the fur
of a torn roadside doe. The wind rises,
stops. Death observes the rhythm method,
like jokes, like love, like breath. If the mallards
banking hard and splashing down by twos
in an eddy are not mockery but memorial,
what do they write on water? She’s gone, that’s all.