HAPPINESS
The feeling in the chest is red: eruption spreading for whatever cause
as sunlight in the sycamores drains down to clearish orange.
And towns beyond the hills. And friends there. And my dead.
All possible: as if loose slivers from a life (blood shriek and joy shriek
and evenings rainbows rose by the rusted bridge in Bethel and this
warmth circling my rib cage now. . . o let me hold this) could be held.
Peter Campion is the author of two collections of poetry, Other People (2005) and The Lions (2009), both from the University of Chicago Press. He also published a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson in 2004, with Terrence Rogers Fine Art. His poems and prose have appeared recently in "ArtNews", "The Boston Globe", "Modern Painters", "The New York Times", "The New Republic", "Poetry", "Slate", and "The Yale Review". Campion has received a George Starbuck Lectureship at Boston University, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, a Pushcart Prize, and a Civitella Ranieri Individual Artist’s Fellowship. He is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Auburn University and edits the journal Literary Imagination, which is published by Oxford University Press.