October 2012
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founded in 1912 by harriet monroe October 2012 FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cci • number 1 CONTENTS October 2012 POEMS joshua mehigan 3 Down in the Valley The Cement Plant The Professor todd boss 6 Accounting laura kasischke 7 You’ve Come Back to Me The Second Death Ativan Game john poch 12 Good Year Elegy for a Suicide gail wronsky 14 Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers campbell mcgrath 15 Releasing the Sherpas Nox Borealis Pentatina for Five Vowels elizabeth seydel 18 September 2011 morgan The Span kathleen jamie 20 Moon The Stags from 100 YEARS josephine miles 25 Heir paul goodman 26 “Dreams Are the Royal Road to the Unconscious” marie ponsot 27 A Visit Private and Profane sara teasdale 30 The Answer The Long Hill james laughlin 32 My Ambition edward dahlberg 34 From “Five Poems” michael donaghy 38 Machines Cage, louis macneice 40 Prognosis Obituary COMMENT christian wiman 45 Mastery and Mystery: Twenty-One Ways to Read a Century c.k. williams 63 Nature and Panic abigail deutsch 68 In the Penile Colony contributors 75 back page 91 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Reader christina pugh Art Direction winterhouse studio cover art by bernard williams “Saw Horse Pegasus,” 2012 POETRYMAGAZINE.ORG a publication of the POETRY FOUNDATION printed by cadmus professional communications, us Poetry • October 2012 • Volume 201 • Number 1 Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. 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POEMS joshua mehigan Down in the Valley It was her first time coming home from college. She headed downtown for a drink or two. Her girlfriend went home early. That was Christmas. Now, under sapling pine trees in the clearing, snowdrops are coming back to their old places. They had been gone a lifetime. Now they stand, poised like a choir on the verge of singing: Nature is just. There’s nothing left to fear. The worst thing that can happen happened here. Joshua MEHIGAN 3 The Cement Plant The cement plant was like a huge still nailed in gray corrugated panels and left out forty-five years ago in the null center of a meadow to tax itself to remorseless death near a black stream and briars, where from the moment it began to breathe, it began falling apart and burning. But it still went, and the men were paid. The plant made dust. Impalpably fine, hung in a tawny alkaline cloud, swept into drifts against mill room piers, frozen by rain on silo ledges, dust was its first and its final cause. Pinups were traced on their car windshields. Dust gave them jobs, and killed some of them. Late into evening their teeth grated. Its product was dust, its problem dust. The thing was blind to all its own ends but the one. Men’s ordinary lives, measured out on a scale alien to that on which its life was measured, were spent in crawling the junk machine, fitting new gaskets, screws, and bearings, deceiving it towards the mood required for it to avail and pay. Somehow it did. None cheered it. It sustained them. 4 POETRY The Professor I get there early and I find a chair. I squeeze my plastic cup of wine. I nod. I maladroitly eat a pretzel rod and second an opinion I don’t share. I think: whatever else I am, I’m there. Afterwards, I escape across the quad into fresh air, alone again, thank god. Nobody cares. They’re quite right not to care. I can’t go home. Even my family is thoroughly contemptuous of me. I look bad. I’m exactly how I look. These days I never read, but no one does, and, anyhow, I proved how smart I was. Everything I know is from a book. Joshua MEHIGAN 5 todd boss Accounting Its fine incisors grinding my mother fed my father’s fledgling carpentry concern into her adding machine as if its hunger could be satisfied costs and savings spooling to our wooden kitchen floor and pooling amounting to nothing a shop tool’s shavings. 6 POETRY laura kasischke You’ve Come Back to Me For G A small thing crawling toward me across this dark lawn. Bright eyes the only thing I’m sure I see. You’ve come back to me, haven’t you, my sweet? From long ago, and very far. Through crawling dark, my sweet, you’ve come back to me, have you? Even smaller this time than the stars. Laura KASISCHKE 7 The Second Death So like the slow moss encroaching, this dark anxiety. In the bricks by now and all along the shaded left side of the house. And the statue, behind her knee. Her ankle, in the cool space between her breasts, spreading in the earliest hours of the morning. Between her fingers. Her parted lips. That black-green whispering. 8 POETRY Ativan That dream of a cricket in the dark of the night at the foot of the gallows tree. Virtuous cricket. Little, hopeful heart- shaped face lit up by the moon. Little, hopeful, insistent song about the future sung to a hanged man’s boots. Laura KASISCHKE 9 Game I thought we were playing a game in a forest that day. I ran as my mother chased me. But she’d been stung by a bee. Or bitten by a snake. She shouted my name, which even as a child I knew was not “Stop. Please. I’m dying.” I ran deeper into the bright black trees happily as she chased me: How lovely the little bits and pieces. The fingernails, the teeth. Even the bombed cathedrals being built inside of me. How sweet the eye socket. The spine. The curious, distant possibility that God had given courage to human beings that we might suffer a little longer. And by the time I was willing to admit that all along all along I’d known it was no game 10 POETRY I was a grown woman, turning back, too late. Laura KASISCHKE 11 john poch Good Year January. I pluck it, this feather flapping in the high mesquite only head-high, caught by the down, iridescent, turkey. Another feather hugging the ditch along the fence line and another ... A coyote somewhere naps happy, grinning like the feather evolved from a leaf. What luck. Clouds lift above the field as if to swallow my eye into hunger. Good hunger. The greatest eye must behold me like an ember dropped into a finch nest, and I smoke at the mouth like a gun dreaming in a safe of a war it can win by virtue of its praise. I have lost the killer phrase I concocted on my country walk with the feather in my pocket. I cock it. 12 POETRY Elegy for a Suicide She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact: there’s only so much you can do with friction and an intentional hand before the hand burns. The sound that scissors make in a child’s hand while crunching construction paper aches when she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style, that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk. Ah, the white beneath things. And the black below that. We come down from bunk beds. We come down from the funky reds and yellows of the spring’s summer tanager gone in fall. We fail to see the most vivid birds high in the trees on the other side of leaves. Where did those sad seeds come from or how take root? Her departure spun out of some samara down into a maple shadow that shadows well into night’s sweet syrup. O host, we don’t know the words for this country, and this country pretends we have no knife, no guns in the bedroom, no large car for escaping or crashing over hard hillsides or into houses.