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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE uglyducklingpresse.org UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) K AT E C O L B Y UGLY DUCKLNG PRESSE UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) The Return of the Native © Kate Colby, 2011 First Edition, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011 ISBN 978-1-933254-77-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data THE Colby, Kate. The return of the native / Kate Colby. — 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-933254-77-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. PS3603.O419R47 2011 811'.6—dc22 RETURN 2010051410 O F T H E Ugly Duckling Presse at the Old American Can Factory 232 Third Street, E002 Brooklyn, NY 11215 (www.uglyducklingpresse.org) NATIVE Distributed by Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org) Ugly Duckling Presse is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. Design & Typesetting: Don’t Look Now! Type: Gloucester, Gill Sans, Garamond Cover Printing: Ugly Duckling Presse Cover Paper: Fabriano / Tiziano Printing & Binding: McNaughton & Gunn Thank you to the editors of Coconut, NO: A Journal of the Arts and Shampoo, in which sections of this poem first appeared. UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) TABLE OF CONTENTS The Inevitable Movement Onward {1} The Morning and the Evening of a Day {3} Firmness Is Discovered in a Gentle Heart {6} Rough Coercion Is Employed {7} Sharp Words Are Spoken and a Crisis Ensues {9} A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion {11} Humanity Appears upon the Scene Hand in Hand with Trouble {14} A Conjuncture, and Its Result upon the Pedestrian {16} A Lurid Light Breaks In upon a Darkened Understanding {19} She Goes Out to Battle Against Depression {20} A Face on Which Time Makes But Little Impression {23} Through the Moonlight {27} The Two Stand Face to Face {29} Queen of Night {30} The Dishonesty of an Honest Woman {33} The Custom of the Country {36} My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is {40} Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning {41} A Coalition Between Beauty and Oddness {48} The Figure Against the Sky {51} Perplexity Among Honest People {52} Those Who Are Found Where There Is Said to Be Nobody {57} An Old Move Inadvertently Repeated {59} The First Act in a Timeworn Drama {61} UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) The Inevitable Movement Onward So, he laid down his hammer and he died. A world is peopled with Xs for eyes and gotten away with toll taken late and just as soon assigned to last year’s bottom line. Pioneer Days one pays to pan for gold—fool’s nostalgic pay dirt trumps being played triplets with your left hand two-timing with your right. Sky-high and hand-tying green’s fee of the strapped ways and means overseeing trustees I don’t ever want to see this world again—not with these eyes. a yonder —LALITA MADHAVA DAS that’s rather more yellow let mellow if anything other than fangled. UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) The Morning and the Evening of a Day Plucked from rolling pie-cart at the roll call— to want Slowly grows to take the hoary morn this role of fingered frost and fill it infection spread across the wavy windows. say throwing Wessex back on the wheel so the product becomes its packaging. A fingerprint burns in reflexive research for identical snowflakes, the invisible seam of this sugar-egg landscape before it clouds over again with sanded banks and frozen ruts in the mud a dampened thud on the slumping stoop a bit of movement in the bowels of the morning’s historical romance say something starring Depardieu. My non-dairy creamer is clumping your coffee 2 3 UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) my coffee- functional duck boots, mate clouding your cup o’ bug juice, boiled dinner my coffee —wouldn’t mind at all (adopted (abandoned my mind running off at the mouth highway right blinker while things crust up in its corners. blinking Is it geodesy or stick-to-itive local parsimony, my practical and the sky is as round as the rest of it. Congregational education in always putting to good use The grist mill ground away with the water the drippings. source dried up pipes This old thing? jazzy track at the Post Road Payless— A stopper chain Hey Jude, rust stained, so you’re chipping away that stone dust in your nose strip it. isn’t really real, but at least you can feel it. In decline an ancient line I’d like to be at home of in a truck backing up rethinking in the morning, the sound better leave it of salt on the road, in the mud room. the bottle rolling around in the back to have like lichen reciprocal sense of my own 4 5 UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Firmness Is Discovered in a Gentle Heart Rough Coercion Is Employed And just for the record Cart has overtaken horse this is not jazz but light and is now overturning over the lip of the black hole—suction required trot trot to trot trot to stick to the side, a centrifugal ride It’s all downhill from here. The Gravitron Things that didn’t antecede —Turkish Twist? their names were made and meant the fist to be made ready I will shatter in this unblinking mirror. all colors already discovered, a county of traces on wayside signposts. A taste of fame and of a sudden all those years suck down the drain in retroactive assignation in a role like a ring too big for the finger as slipped on retro-spected, checkered past and kinged by retracting escape ladder climb up into a narrow window and draw the blinds behind you. 6 7 UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Trees on tiny offshore islands Sharp Words Are Spoken and a Crisis Ensues with theoretical leaves and all the things that can’t happen History loves company. simply because you know they can’t. Old soldiers lie only six inches under. The sky is white Spoon up next to them with the kind of lightning in two-player games of that always strikes at least twice sardines—turn the key and hail the size of the holes and close the can behind me. in your windshield—stopping you dead your tracks Keep your distance; I am wrapped in a paper bag the sound of a rock or raft with tax-free rocks and salty rims around which water laps at the wayside Stateline Liquor Store. bubbles in hard candy [We will not be undersold!] that cut your tongue and make your candy How a life taste like blood takes on a life its very own. a plastic Adirondack chair. Can’t resist one last I’ve beeped back up into round on the house stomping grounds: boot- and every single time. scrapes, stoops I’ve tracked all over the house have to cough just to feel my own soft interior walls 8 9 UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) buzzing with darkness A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion and wheezy insects soughing in the trees peters out pre-dawn To move and into the hollow so to see feeling of fall. the medium in a moment. Sleepy seeds crusting the corners of my eyes Home is where the head is dusk breaks scarlet taken. sumac, bayberry, bittersweet scent of Lying back in a warm bath my waxy wick: waiting for the water Autumn Mist to get cold in a gradual disambiguation— a security blanket to bleed out into. dear amphibian, never mind the slow death, To write only to have only jump at the sudden. thought of something (or the opposite) Now back in the technicolonial color of my youth— bitter blue an empty packet of sweetener juniper berries (in case of emergency) crushed between fingers My dead are where my lands lie buried lackluster pewter, umbrella tines, rusted between the Hilltop Steakhouse and Suffolk Downs tins of powder Colman’s Mustard. and never to regain the ground A frowsy form at the bitter end we’ve turned into. of cross-continental continuum— power lines and cloud formations 10 11 UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Harley Ds and E Clampus Vitus bubbles for your own chapter saloons, bee-stung barmaids time in fin-de-siècle-reminiscent pantaloons being; holding your breath is not slapped-on bumper regalia the same as not breathing.