Argued
by Sean Sexton
8/24
One glimpse up from the page and there’s the eye
peeking between folded blue cloths in the sky—a
chance encounter with light—as I pour through old,
mistaken pages of my books, altering in pencil what
cannot be changed in print, all before tonight’s reading.
It’s a world come again to what’s continually changed
—perhaps an early rain pends this morning; there has
been none for days. The eye grows bright and blinding,
fan murmuring overhead, in its soft, atonal purr. These,
my words are but a dawning onto paper.
That anyone speaks a single thing is ever more toward
being than demise. No one, given the chance would
refuse an extra life. Now the sky grows sullen and dim,
drops begin to fall, world’s breath rises, rousing everything.
Frogs start yelling for all they’re worth.
Sean Sexton was born in Indian River County and grew up on his family's Treasure Hammock Ranch. He divides his time between managing a 700-acre cattle operation, painting, and writing. He is author of two chapbooks, and three full volumes of poetry: Blood Writing, Poems, Anhinga Press, 2009, and May Darkness Restore, Poems, Press 53, 2019, and Portals, Poems, Press 53, 2023. He performs regularly at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV, and is on the faculty of the 2024 Southeastern Writers Assn. Conference on St. Simon's Island, GA in June . He was nominated for a 2020 and 2021 Pushcart Prize and received a FL Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 2001. He's a board member of the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation and founding event chair of their Annual Poetry and Barbeque held each April, now in its fifteenth year. He also co-founded Poetry and Organ Advent and Lenten Concert Series at Community Church in Vero Beach, FL featuring nine concerts annually attracting poets from all over the US. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016.
