Robert Lavett Smith Entering the Tomb Three days after his eighty-seventh birthday my father receives a call from a friend in New York as I'm sitting next to him and my mother at the senior housing facility in Fort Collins where they have moved to be nearer to my sister's family. We can hear only his side of the conversation. He remembers his former student, and seems glad to hear from him, but says abruptly, "We're not in Fort Collins anymore; actually, I have no idea where the hell we are." (He has hardly ever sworn in his long life.) He hands the cell phone back to Mom with the bewildered air of an archaeologist who, upon entering the tomb, is confronted by an artifact both ancient and inscrutable, whose function, forgotten for millennia, he can't begin to fathom or to guess. Raised in New Jersey, Robert Lavett Smith has lived
since 1987 in San Francisco, where for the past sixteen years he has
worked as a Special Education Paraprofessional. He has studied with
Charles Simic and the late Galway Kinnell. He is the author of several
chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, the most recent of
which is The Widower Considers Candles (Full Court Press, 2014).Two poems from this newest book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
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