“At the Dinner Table at Night”

You’ve gone to bed with the baby again, as I step 

gingerly through the house, searching for quiet projects 

I can take to completion and leave for you like origami. 

Each room for you to wake in as you wander, 

brewing a gift like morning coffee, the raw ends 

of your several lists now seared and cooling.

It’s much nicer when we can sit here 

as a family a few moments longer, while our girl 

begins to improvise tomorrow aloud, ticking off 

her list of necessaries, countermanding the plot 

with reasonable justifications which she has collected 

from the pond like pretty rocks. To sit here, 

with large glasses of water in front of us, 

and a bowl of dressed cabbage now resting. 

To age and grow together this way, to keep 

unfeigned the family hug she often calls for; 

the marriage and the patterns of work and rising, 

not to let them go to seed; to allow ourselves 

to achieve our own narrative, to board the right train, 

see there are still seats for us, to watch the rifling 

landscape harmonize, on this one route, headed 

towards the very spot on the map we had agreed on.

How right it would feel to maintain the memory of being

at the dinner table at night, and, before bath and bedtime, 

to have thrown a last jacket back on—it being a clear night, 

after all—and to step out onto the driveway, caps on our heads,

holding hands or not, but together, and just look up.

I bring copies of the book to readings.

Praise for The Red Goose:

"Like his antecedent, Hayden Carruth, Allen Guy Wilcox writes poems rooted in upstate New York and Vermont, in the spaces of a rural America that are in-between. These are spaces of loss and beauty and nostalgia. The Red Goose moves across ordinary American life — a winter test drive through Almond, New York; a daughter counting her rain boots; a son clearing the loft his father built — and finds beauty in these moments. These are poems of family, labor, love, and the passage of parents. They are sad and lovely."  

- Pauls Toutonghi
Author of THE REFUGEE OCEAN



"I've been reading the deft, alluring poems of Allen Guy Wilcox for many years, and it’s a pleasure to have the very best of them gathered in this sumptuous first collection. Wilcox is a poet of immense gifts: his ear is keen, and he is alert to the reverberations of language, the way sounds call to sounds, attentive to the music of everyday life. Each of his poems carries a tune, and the sequence as a whole is granular, vividly imagistic, and wonderfully varied. He summons a largely rural world that, for me, is deeply appealing. I will read The Red Goose again and again.”

- Jay Parini
Author of NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS: 1975-2015