Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog

A few years ago, my friend the designer Jan Almquist, who was teaching a course at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, asked if one of his students could use a poem of mine for a video project.

Jeremy Collinson chose “Indwelling,” a poem that is part of my ecopoem sequence called “Dwelling.” The poem originally appeared in the University of Pennsylvania’s literary journal, CrossConnect. Here is the animated video, a filmpoem, if you will of my poem “Indwelling”:

A number of the poems from my Dwelling sequence have been published. You can find a sampling here.

And here is the text of the poem:

Indwelling

Shooting stars cross a city night sky.  In the moment

before they fall, think about dwellings,

houses made of brick, stone, and wood—dwelling and indwelling—

miracle keeping matter together, from imploding or inverting.

How dwellings become a city, interdependent.

How stars become a night sky, suspended.

(Late fall, nearly winter, fog-caul warms night air through inversion.  

The meteor version of life heads straight to the matter of our bed.)

What holds up the sky holds each one of us, too—

as we move against one another in this taut, elastic field,

warming with each movement, causing little inversions

all around us, and shooting stars—

                                    there goes another.

–Scott Edward Anderson