Todd (Ryan) Boss (born December 6, 1968) is an American poet, installation artist, and film producer.
He has published several notable collections of poetry, besides many contributions to literary journals, and has also produced a large body of poetry intended for musical setting, most frequently in collaboration with the composer Jake Runestad.
Boss’s pared-down, idea-driven poems are propelled by internal rhyme and balance clarity with a nuanced attention to sound. “I think of poems as pieces of music, or a work of architecture,” he told the Utne Reader in 2009. “The poem is a space that you’re inviting someone into for a time. I think a lot about how to build it, how they feel when they’re there, and how they will exit.”
Tell us more about this poem and how it relates to museums and churches. “My favorite services are Taize services, in which no one preaches or interprets. The goal, achieved simply through song and silence, preferably by candlelight, is to create an environment for the encounter with God.”
FEAST
Todd Boss
I’d Like to Go Through All Your Rooms
one by one and turn out lights
and unplug appliances so there’s
nothing left humming or
glowing or ticking or storing
anything in memory or listening
for the radio beam of a remote
to tell it what it ought to do
and then I’d like to lay you down
in a quiet as deep as blankets
and let the snow do all the hard
thinking that still needs doing and
put the moon in charge of making
old ideas new again and then
I’d like to put my hands against
whatever you’ve got in storage
and push it across your attic floor
so there’s room for us to do
what we don’t need one damned
thing in the world to do while
out on the lawn the auctioneer
begins the bidding on yes the
bidding who will start the bidding
and let the bidding of the cosmos
yes yes the bidding of the cosmos
going once going twice undo us
of everything worldly we possess.
======
IT IS ENOUGH TO ENTER
Todd Boss
the templar
halls of museums, for
example, or
the chambers of churches,
and admire
no more than the beauty
there, or
remember the graveness
of stone, of
whatever. You don’t
have to do any
better. You don’t have to
understand
the liturgy or know history
to feel holy
in a gallery or presbytery.
It is enough
to have come just so far.
You need
not be opened any more
than does
a door, standing ajar.
=============
NOCTURNE
Todd Boss
We tend
to sleep better
when the clock
is wound
than we do
when it’s all
wound down.
I don’t know
why we settle
to the sound.
Somehow
the regular
click and chime
of passing time,
like water, turns
a water wheel
that turns a gear
that turns a stone
that turns upon
another stone
and fine
and finer in between
our dreams like grain
are ground.