“A Brief Portfolio,” by Daniel Tobin

Poetry faculty member and 1990 alum Daniel Tobin was recently featured in Plume. Read an excerpt of Tobin’s work below:

A Brief Portfolio

From “AT THE GRAVE OF TEILHARD DE CHARDIN”

(Fan and Spearhead)

Marguerite Teilhard de Chambon

Like conifers in the Bois de Boulogne where he would walk
dreaming of Auvergne, home, the massif of Puy-de-Dome
long before his exile east, that’s how he envisioned the rise,

this progressive genesis of the universe, and of the human
phenomenon, across the fraught, material frontier into life,
and life, fanning, groping—directed chance—into thought.

When he would visit Clermont-Ferrand, my dearest cousin,
as a child, he would carry frogs for study into his bedroom.
Years later, I invited him to Rue de Fleurus, to my Institute

to school my girls on evolution, never mind what he called
“the cage of dogma,” mindful instead of truth’s “axis,”
and him knowing as I do–despite my male nom de plume—

the need to feminize the species. From the front, then,
he wrote to me of blasted ridges, of poplar trees misted
with gas, of this world recasting itself anew through battle.

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://plumepoetry.com/a-brief-portfolio-3/