Poems by Robert Lavett Smith

At 56

Love is not something I think about now,
like a yellowing Playbill folded in a book
misplaced on a high shelf, the performance
forgotten save for a hint of music,
delicate and strange, threaded through
some instrument I will never learn to play.

Raised in New Jersey, Robert Lavett Smith has lived since 1987 in San Francisco, where for the past fifteen years he has worked as a Special Education Paraprofessional. He has studied with Charles Simic and Galway Kinnell. He is the author of several chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which is Smoke In Cold Weather: A Gathering of Sonnets (Full Court Press, 2013).