Peter Cooley was born and educated in the Midwest and has lived over half of his life in New Orleans, where he was Professor of English and Director of Creative writing at Tulane University and is now Professor Emeritus. The former Poet Laureate of Louisiana, he received the Marble Faun Award in Poetry and an Atlas Grant from the state of Louisiana. The father of three grown children, he published his tenth book World Without Finishing in 2018.
–for Jacqueline Cooley, 1944-2018 Last night the trees changed color while I slept. One moment at my window: a new world. Love, do you continue transmuting where you are? Pandemonium of the color wheel. That raucousness. Noise the sky can hear I call October falling. Now, outside, calling you to join me, Love, I kick…
The first eternity is things, the second our imagining, the third my soul, flying out to her, donning the purple robe she sewed, Wisconsin winter, thirty years ago. Purple, the color of a king. I wear that robe New Orleans June. Of the wounds, this is just one. I asked our priest to bring her…
