Absence Podcast

By David Reese

Poems and other works

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FAQs about Absence Podcast:

How many episodes does Absence Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 14 episodes available.

Absence Podcast episodes:

July 28, 2025 Reading: Absolution
What of our anger
Toward our fathers
When the world now
Is given to the young
Still unaware of
Our trespasses
Forgive us our debts
We plead as we were taught
To all our judges
Especially our sons
Heartsick in twenty years
At our defenses
Of ignorance, poverty, pain
June 2021

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1min
July 18, 2025 Song: Carry Me
Carry me, carry me over black water
In a flat-bottomed boat
Through the reeds
My silver, my silver
Is good as it could be
Don't wait, sir, please ferry me
Don't you wait, sir, please ferry me
Here at the landing
She comes with her lantern
Weeping and calling my name
Still lovely as ever
But such pain when I see her
Won't you, sir, please carry me
Don't you wait, sir, please carry me
Carry me, carry me over black water
The hour is coming too soon
Her feet cold and bare on the leaves
As she searches
And follows the moon through the trees
I didn't come from a war
Or from saving another
I was only the victim of
The paper-mill fire
My body washed up
Half a mile from the landing
Won't you please ferry me
Don't wait, sir, please ferry me
Carry me, carry me over black water
In a flat-bottomed boat
Through the reeds
My silver, my silver
Is good as it could be
Don't wait, sir, please ferry me
Don't you wait, sir, please ferry me

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4min
July 16, 2025 Reading: Counterparty Risk
I should
Look up terms
Like counterparty risk
Before using them
In poems about love
Be responsible
With the language
To which
We share a
Vast unreciprocated duty
(Which itself is love)
But it is a thrill
In writing poems about love
To risk looking foolish and
Outmatched by words and
Attempt surgery
With no training and
Wrap ligaments of experience
Around bodiless
Contract law idioms and
Suggest the
Septic dread of all
That can go wrong in love the
Unpaperable terror and thrill
When always in love we
Risk looking foolish and
Outmatched by words and
Attempt surgery
With no training
May 2021

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2min
July 12, 2025 Song: Are You Trying to Break My Heart
Oh, my love, it would be a sin,
After all this time,
To give in, give in.
Six months in the bottle won’t touch the pain.
You leave your note, but
The questions remain.
Are you trying to break my heart?
Would you even go out if your way? Or
Would you let it just happen
As you come and go?
Ain’t there nothing that you want to say?
Oh, hold me again.
Oh, hold me again.
Oh, my love, what set you on fire?
You give nothing for free;
Gave me nothing for hire.
You drank gasoline cause you like how it feels.
Now I lay in the road and watch you burn up the hills.
Chorus
Oh, my love, it would be a sin,
After all this time, to not come home again.
You say that for love you’d walk straight into hell.
But the things you do now you just do for yourself.

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6min
July 07, 2025 Reading: Noise Machines
If you want
Her attention,
Good luck.
America’s
Down for
A nap.
Lined her bed
With signal-
Burying
Machines
To defend the
Beast of her
Imagination.
If she dreams
You are flying, you
Will fly.
If she dreams
You are
Being pursued, you
Will be pursued.
If she dreams
You are
Being interrogated
By people with
No faces, you
Will be interrogated
By people with
No faces.
If she dreams
You are pushed
From a
Great height, you
Will be pushed
From a
Great height.
If she dreams
The world is
The-same-but-
Not-quite, you
Will live as you
Now are living.
To defend the
Beast of her
Imagination,
She
Lined her bed
With signal-
Burying
Machines.
America’s
Down for
A nap.
If you want
Our attention,
Good luck.
Good luck.
July 7, 2025

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2min
July 06, 2025 Reading: H-Day
Each Local Association
Of Alabama Baptists,
Once a year, in charity,
Received a delegation
From my school
Of preacher boys;
I was one.
At a
Parking-lot rally-point,
The shepherds—
Most part-time, machinists
Or farmers, with
Leather-handed grips—
Stood in conference
In their circle of trucks,
Would draft the day’s
Apprentice,
Abduct him to appear
Before a congregation
Further—even further—
In the hills.
At least once or twice
Came with us
Preacher-boys from
Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana or
Tanzania,
Who spoke of
Jesus like a lover. These!
Being Black,
Met with boycott.
There were, of course,
No scenes, just
Muttered nos and
Out-thrust jaws. The
Shepherds
Said their people—I
Learned only by rumor—
Would not accept
This thing.
We preacher boys
Complained—but later,
To our school.
I left in ‘95, heard
That a friend
Who came to
Run the program
Drew a line,
Laid down a rule:
Take all or none.
It worked.
*****
At least three, four
Times a year
I wonder how—
Even at sixteen—
I let myself be
Driven off to preach,
Silent beside the
Shepherd, leaving
Behind two, three
Servants of God
From Africa,
Heavy with a Word,
No white man
Willing to receive it.
May 2025

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3min
July 05, 2025 Oh Seven Oh Four Twenty-Five
To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candle-lit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say alas but cannot help or pardon.
—excerpt from Spain 1937 by W.H. Auden.

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1min
July 03, 2025 Reading: When This is Over
“I am for the law, cousin. Is there another side?”
— John Adams (apocryphal)
When this is
Over, I want
Only a few things
I want the State to
Pass you by, pass
So far from you that
You will have to
Drive an hour
To see the meter-deep
Craters left by its

Slow square feet, see
Water piled in the holes, see
Cottonmouths in that water,
Mosquitos breeding
You will have that
Afternoon, or even the
Rest of your life, to
Wonder where the Monster
Headed, whom it was
Hunting, served to the
Rest of your days
By official indifference
And
I want your sleep
To meet your doctor’s
Recommended amount, for
You to be found
Surprised at seeing your
Eightieth birthday, for your
Grandchildren to return
All your doting attention
And
I want
No harm to you, friend;
No, to you
Only the impressed fact that
Your baiting and luring
Of the Monster, your
Turn at its tiller,
Had me awake all night,
Every night, asking
Where and
When
To run
May 2025

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2min
July 02, 2025 Reading: Widow's Walk
They call it the
Widow’s walk—
The roof-deck
Where the forlorn
Pace,
Wear smooth its planks,
Receive
Over weeks
The arrival of
Never—

These months,
Which we took for our
Lookout—now
Our school
For unlearning
Old hopes
Stripped by the wind
From our hands,
Borne over
The dunes
Like a
Lost veil
June 2025

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1min
June 28, 2025 Reading: Finding a Shoe
As if looking for my other shoe under our bed
When I have not troubled to turn on any of the three bedroom lamps
And the shoe is black
And not recently polished so as to send my way
Some of the light that
Has slipped the double curtains
Into our room
To escape the winter dusk
And we are due to dinner with old friends in exactly
The half hour it will take
To sprint and speed and park and sprint
To the restaurant where
They will announce a divorce
And we will end the evening, us two,
Having parted from them with all assurances,
In a silent walk, like from a burial,
Ashamed of our luck
This cannot be done with one shoe
Nor two shoes that do not match
That is rude
And so
As if looking for my other shoe under our bed
And pawing and blaming and with no sense
That is how I look for ways
To write about death
January 2021

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidreese.substack.com
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2min

FAQs about Absence Podcast:

How many episodes does Absence Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 14 episodes available.