Michael Heffernan currently teaches at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the author of several collections, including Love's Answer (winner of the 1994 Iowa Poetry Prize) and, most recently, The Odor of Sanctity (Salmon Poetry, 2008) and The Cry of Oliver Hardy (reprinted by the University of Georgia Press, 2008). Individual poems have appeared in the Southern Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Crab Orchard Review, Shenandoah, Margie, Third Coast, Measure, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest, among others. “Medallion,” from The Night Breeze off the Ocean (Eastern Washington University Press, 2005), was read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, October 19, 2008.

“Town Water” suggests a vision by a road in the countryside near where I live, while I was out biking sometime in the early 1990s. The spot itself is a little lyrical moment. The child in the poem may be one of my sons when he was small, probably the youngest, whose eyes are blue. I realize that the element of loss is prevalent as an undertone. The thought of any of my sons, when they were children, makes me think of the passage of time. Yeats once wrote of a baby in the cradle, in one of the loveliest poems of its kind, “I shall miss you, / When you are grown.” (Good God!)

The title refers to the piped-in water the flower is put in, in a fruit juice glass. It is not intended to be ecological, though there is some recycling involved. The phrase “alien beauty” once was a candidate for a book title.

This poem is about the activity of the imagination. All poems are about the activity of the imagination, if they are real poems. Only bad poems are about anything else.