An Imaginable Future
poems by
Douglas Nordfors
ISBN: 978-1-964277-73-8, 80 pages, $15 (+ shipping)
January 28, 2026
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Douglas Nordfors has published three previous books of poetry, Auras (2008), The Fate Motif (2013), and Half-Dreaming (2020), all with Plain View Press. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Quarterly West, The Louisville Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Iowa Review. He is also a fiction writer. His short stories have appeared in several journals, and he has self-published three novels, Jane Davies, Little Book, which is based on the early life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Wokokon. A native of Seattle, he currently lives in Virginia, and teaches at Piedmont Virginia Community College.
These fine poems by Douglas Nordfors are animated by the fascination and frustration that springs up between experience and perception. In a voice of casual observation, self-deprecation, and poignant insight, he confides in us at the center of crowded places, sunlit afternoons, and solitary walks. Nordfors paints people and scenes like watercolors, and these may spiral into surreal distances from the gristle of road kill into a stellar night scene. An Imaginable Future is a book that you will want to reread in years to come. ~Avery Chenoweth, Author of Wingtips, and Radical Doubt
In An Imaginable Future by Douglas Nordfors, we sense the fragile balance of longing and acceptance. Set in the realm of everyday life—diners and sidewalks, shopping malls and parks, deer and blossoms—the book asks us to consider how to retain a sense of wonder in the face of inevitable half-knowledge. Each poem presents a koan asking us an intriguing question, while enacting the impossible project of uttering one true thing. ~Robin Reagler, author of The Always (2025) and Night Is This Anyway (2022)
With An Imaginable Future, Douglas Nordfors proves himself a poet of remarkable originality, transforming ordinary encounters into luminous revelations. His poems move through familiar landscapes—coffee shops, diners, trees reaching across rivers—uncovering profound questions about connection, mortality, and meaning. As he observes in “The Blue Moon”: “I argue for your heart, for its clear goodness,” while envisioning a future where we might see “the world in a grain.” These poems are contemplative, surprising, and deeply moving. ~Steve Bellin-Oka, author of Instructions for Seeing a Ghost and Tell Me Exactly What You Saw and What You Think It Means
GIVING ADVICE
Hope for the best, and define the best
as a watered-down version of heaven.
To thank for such nonsense I have a part
of the brain that shouldn’t be used, the part
that considers a red rose and a red rose
and finds one lovelier. Obviously,
I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I shouldn’t be giving advice, prone
as I am to making breathtaking
mistakes, like looking for solitude
in a public park, like seeing a glob
of trash that rainwater glued to a street,
and rainwater sticking to a gutter’s path,
as a reflection of all that happens
when people strive to make the world
a better place. I should be receiving
spiritual guidance from a child sliding
down a slide in a public park, should be
imagining mothers and fathers forming
a chain around the park to prevent
disappointment from entering our lives,
should be defining a street as an artery
that can require cleansing, a stop sign
as an interval of peace, a dead end
as the mouth of a river, an ocean
as a deep humanity filling a breathable
society the moon governs with a soft hand.
AN AUDIENCE MEMBER
MUSES DURING INTERMISSION
No, from deepest grief I will not be able
to pull myself back. Over the edge,
with inherent gravity, down with
beautiful rising, I will go, and touch
the ground like a ballet dancer lifting a rose up off the stage.
Yes, at this stage, no face
sees my deathless eyes. I forgo
two fingers, and I am like a stem
held together by eight petals, rooted to a wholeness.
Unevenly divided, I will make more than landfall.
No, I will not experience ex-
communication from deepest bliss,
swung moods closing like curtains over
never-impending pendulums. Yes,
I will be able to pull myself back. And the edge,
trespassing, will fall back for a time
into a womb, and almost
wither, while I will downturn from bloom
to blossom and back again,
refusing to turn up in another world
where mercilessness
and lovelessness, lifeless, even worse
than god in anti-heaven can conceive, always
thrive. Where, always, the tragic end
is the absolute end.
THE VOICE OF WINTER
You walking outside inside
me, I give you the shape
of deer tracks in and in,
over and over, the snow,
your eyes tracking the body,
the thin legs, through this
inconceivable world, not
like a hunter, no, your
eyes actually falling
on the snow, but achieving
less than the snow did
by falling. Into last spring
your legs walk aimlessly
parallel to the tracks,
the cold underneath your
coat opening and opening
at the seams, until you can,
it seems, hear me (I can’t hear
myself) promising meat
for flowers to eat.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
My mind’s largesse is like
a bankrupt charity.
What can my mind give
to a world of things, save love?
What is love but wizened
trees trying to give mouth
to mouth to a whole city,
a whole city that has
the small elbows children have,
children who can’t in the wild
survive without a great beak
feeding them worms? My mind
has nothing to give, save words.
Not “wizened,” no. The wind
that blows through my mind
sees, in a land under a city,
the bright shadows of trees
shooting up to see where
nowhere has gotten them:
somewhere, the real world
trying to relate to itself,
to be dealt with, just like
the mathematical concept of infinity.
