After Apple-Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Robert Frost

The Requisite Grin

You'd shove her up against a wall and fuck her,
just like I would, if you got the chance, the young
lesbian tells me, speaking of a popular singer

better known for her strategically arranged
bits of clothing than her voice. It's not a name
I recognize, though I know the type. However,

I try to imaging the basic act: to trick, trap
or toss the singer smack against the brick
and strip away the scraps of designer cloth.

Presumably she would resists, protest, scream
bloody murder. Am I excited by the thought?
I'm afraid I'd mind the bother, I tell my friend,

as I consider how the neighbors would react.
What's more, the singer would think ill of me.
The woman eyes me doubtfully. Your dreams

sure aren't mine, she answers. What are mine?
I wonder. The stripped singer sprawled on a mat
like pink meat offers the sexual moment only;

what cure is that for solitude, the self even yet
condemned to the precincts of the self? I think
of the lack of talk, not gossip, but conversation,

the meat abandoned as simply meat, no person
arising from this most intimate act, the fuck
being beginning, middle and end of the flight

from isolation. My young friend waits as I start
to deflect her words with a joke, also a retreat
from talk, interchange of self with self. Better

a full meal than the snack your singer would offer,
I say. My friend grins the requisite grin. We return
to the impersonal. Soon we could be anyone.

Stephen Dobyns

***********



RL

It's not so much the heat as the stupidity

Excuse me but I'd like to say something that should
in no way be taken as representing other things
I might say or words I could put down
on paper but haven't. And if you extrapolate
from my remarks to other remarks you've heard
or made yourself about the proper use of
or protection of resources from certain uses
then you'll think I speak for a cause or against
that cause with the kind of vehemence
that has spittle flying through the air
and onto your nose and there you are, wanting
to be polite but needing desperately
to wipe it way. It's just that I don't mind
really or take it as a danger to my dog
or children or car or the crackers I have
which are admittedly stale but still a comfort
in the pantry that I paid for with hard work
because and I apologize for this in advance
and mean no slight to the plitical affiliation
of your god or the fondness you have
for a clear green space at night you can imagine
never walking through but of course trees
need their alone time too and here I'll apologize
once more if it's untoward to say that on a night
such as this when the axis of the earth
has tilted away from the sun and the great
comfort of a quilt lies at your feet
or over your feet and the dragon in your basement
snorts hot breath onto your house that I don't
mind if people sleep on the grates in the park
over steam that's going to heaven anyway because
otherwise and I know it's rude to mention this
they'll die.

Bob Hicok

*************



RL

My Son the Man

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, he smiled and let himself be manacled.

Sharon Olds

****************



RL

The Idiot's Guide to Faking Your Own Death and Moving to Mexico

Every few seconds I check the Bible
to see what Jesus is saying about me. The answer
is always nothing. Sometimes

he's condemning me to eternal damnation,
but usually nothing. Tonight I am alone,
wearing my sex shorts, adrift amongst

the black suburban pools of eternal damnation.
No, I have not been in love. Yes,
I have been in love. I am speaking the language

in which no and yes mean the same, in which
apricot and goodbye mean the same.
I am remembering the kudzu of the awful season,

sitting with you beside the swamp for the last
time and neither of us knowing it was the last
time but yes the glass was hello and dragonfly.

Was it a blessing? They say so in this language.
Others say this language is dying, or already
dead. I speak it, nonetheless, while eating

apricots in the evening of eternal damnation
where you yell at the map and cut your wrist
and there is a darkness here that I have only shared

with my cat, like that guy in the movie who writes
graphic erotica and goes crazy. One says
pain near the black pool of everything,

my back is covered with wax. Every few
seconds I check the Bible to see what Jesus
is saying about me. The answer is always nothing,

aside from the time he lambasted the outfit I wore
to the People's Choice Awards. A green tuxedo.
Tonight, I am adrift in the suburb of the black sky,

I am speaking the language in which love
and apricot mean the same, in which pool
and death mean the same. I said goodbye

in a suburb like this, years ago. I said
goodbye in a suburb like this, years ago.
According to Hercules, if we make an angel

out of ourselves, that is what we are; if we make
a devil out of ourselves, that too is what
we are. See, this is what I am getting at.

It is the awful season and I am speaking
the language in which violence and God mean
the same, in which blood and dragonfly mean

the same. I am in the orchard of eternity
picking the goodbyes of damnation, I am licking
your dragonfly blood and speaking the language

in which pain means hello. A black pool,
a green sky. That is to say, each moment
without you is a vacant airport, each moment

without you is a glass apricot. Every few seconds
I check the Bible to see what Jesus is saying
about me. The answer is always nothing. Except

today, it's a bunch of weird stuff about how
I'm falling into a black pool in some suburb,
maybe Palatine or something, and just like that,

I've gone forever. I know! That's what I thought
too. This is the story, but in this language, this
is not the story. I am eating red ice,

harvesting a field of knives. I am speaking
the language in which heaven and earth mean
the same, in which sky and white mean the same.

O Lord, I made this dragonfly for you. Even
if you do not listen to it, just know, this
is how I have always felt about you. And I

am possessed. And I am a fatalist. Do you see
these bruises? Do you see these bruises?
They are a sad bouquet. They are a beautiful

scrapbook. I am floating. I am in love.
I am dead. On a perfect night, my back is covered
with wax. O Violence, but I did not want this hello.

O Lord, I made this dragonfly for you.
Even if You do not listen to it, just know, I made it
only for you.

Jason Bredle

****************



RL

Brother

In mother’s womb, we started as a pair of lungs,
sea slugs hanging on to a reef. We grew toe rays,
brain sponges and gonads relaxed by the liquid song.

The Doppler ultrasound echoed our submarine
and found us one. The truth was monozygotic—
we sucked each other’s nub of thumb inside the brine.

When, headfirst, we were unceremoniously expelled,
we were halved like an egg sliced with a line of hair.
A beak plucked at the cord and knotted my navel.

Mother never speaks of you although I know
you were with me at sea. How else to understand
my panic playing hide-and-seek, the cracked canoe,

wet dreams of touching a man, waking up, a curse
crying, not knowing why, like a turtle washed ashore,
a lacquered carapace—these shimmering absences?

Jee Leong Koh

**************



RL

Let Birds

Eight deer on the slope
in the summer morning mist.
The night sky blue.
Me like a mare let out to pasture.
The Tao does not console me.
I was given the Way
in the milk of childhood.
Breathing it waking and sleeping.
But now there is no amazing smell
of sperm on my thighs,
no spreading it on my stomach
to show pleasure.
I will never give up longing.
I will let my hair stay long.
The rain proclaims these trees,
the trees tell of the sun.
Let birds, let birds.
Let leaf be passion.
Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be
between us. Let joy.
Let entering. Let rage and calm join.
Let quail come.
Let winter impress you. Let spring.
Allow the ocean to wake in you.
Let the mare in the field
in the summer morning mist
make you whinny. Make you come
to the fence and whinny. Let birds.

Linda Gregg

*************



RL

Moon Face

The side effects of prednisone include mood swings, rounding of the face,
sensation of spinning, thin, shiny skin, and poor wound healing. -About.com

The doctor clicks his pen and says it's just a phase.
My fat moon-face comes second to the x-rays

he pulls from a folder labeled with my room number.
I'm taking 75mgs of Prednisone a day. It's summer,

and I'm paler than I've ever been. Lookin' good,
the doctor says, by which I think he means: you could

look worse. Here in room 208, I've come to love
men who tell the truth, who touch me without gloves,

and let me skimp on barium. My x-ray tech this afternoon
wasn't one. He looked at me as if peering through

a telescope and, I, the cold and distant satellite,
moved quietly into his crosshairs. Hold tight!

he said. I waited for him to let me breathe again.
Released and back at home, I drift into the kitchen.

I'm scarred and white and wide, but never full. I try to sleep.
I think: my life is one big compromise while counting sacrificial sheep.

One night I cup two dozen pills inside my palms,
close my eyes, and think of swallowing them all.

Instead, I eat two sandwiches. Outside, on the night's thin skin,
A white bruise grows, then shrinks, then blooms again.

Celeste Lipkes

**************



RL

Miami Heart

In a long text, on live tv, in an amphitheater, in the soil,
after the post-moderns, after it is still proven
you can get a smile out of a pretty girl,
after the meta-ritual lectures,
after the flock to further awareness bends “south,”
and Heinz switches to plastic squeeze bottles,
as one flies into St. Louis listening to Lorca’s “Luna, luna, luna...,”
beyond Anacin time,
after, God help us, the dishwasher is emptied again,
and Miss America, Miss Mississippi, reveals she has entered 100 pageants
since age six,
Packer’s ball, first down after a fumble,
the corn detassled,
the assembly of enthusiasms awakened,
and we meet in a car by the river
not not kissing, considering
making love, visiting Jerusalem, the awful daily knowledge
we have to die in a hospital on the sixth floor, in a lecture, on live tv,
or in an amphitheater at half-time,
at one’s parents’ condo, over pasta,
in a strange relative’s arms, in debt, along the coast, staring
at a lighthouse, the heart bumping, bumping the old pebble up the old spine,
a squirrel scared up a sycamore by an infant,
along this stench of humility, along that highway of come,
charge card in hand,
I shall give my time freely
and the more I dissemble the more I resemble
and the more I order the more I reveal I hide,
the better, the faster
I sleep the more I remember
to go elsewhere,
a movie, excuse me, now I must whisper
not to disturb the patrons,
now I must drive, now park, tramp to the edge of the world,
roughness, ferocity, cannibalism,
bite, chew, transmogrify,
inside the lungs the little revolutionaries, between the thighs the reflex
it’s too this, it’s too that, it’s not enough,
similarly, and more particularly, it’s raw twice over,
it’s the imagination draining its husks, left-handed,
because comparison is motive, which is why
one writes with one’s desire.

Jane Miller

**************



RL

Lost Cove & The Rose of San Antone

Evening comes on. I put on a clean white shirt
and feel how well it fits me. I pour bourbon,
with spring water from a plastic jug,
and look out sliding glass doors
at green suburban hills blurred with smog.
Two watches lie on the table before me:
one set for now, one telling time in 1938,
their glass faces reflecting the round California sky.

The man I see through the eye of the second watch
sits in a silence too deep for my nerves
and stares out at twilight
fading on trunks of pine and oak.
The black Model-A car rusts into the stream
that runs past his cabin in Lost Cove, Tennessee.
He reaches for the whiskey on the table,
and his sleeve clears a path through pine needles and dust.

The coal that tumbles out of his hillside
soils the air and brick houses in Nashville.
Words burn in the rain there
from the power of water that runs past his door.
He looks at his watch and turns on the radio.
The music reaches him, all the way from Nashville.
He holds his glass of whiskey up to the light
that is almost gone. Its color suits his thoughts.

The fiddles and autoharp fill up the dark room
and push out through paint-blackened screens
into black oaks that press against the house.
His face hurts me. It doesn’t look right.
He goes against the grain
of whiskey he has made himself, and rides
the wire-song of a steel guitar through small towns,
through the bug-crowded air of farm crossings late at night.

The disembodied, high guitar line swims in his nerves
like a salmon up a flint-rock stream,
falls like a hawk on blood.
The whiskey burns and soothes.
His tongue starts to move to the words of the song:
trains and big woods and bottomless rivers,
hard drinking, broken hearts and death.
His blood knows whose song this is.
He’s never swum in no bottomless river,
or rode that night train to Memphis,
or sat and started at those thirteen unlucky bars.
But he sees the moon rise, with the Rose of San Antone
tattooed on it in blood.
A waitress in Denver glides toward him with drinks on a tray.
He stumbles, drunk, through strange woods by an airport
and walks out in San Francisco with a gun in his pocket…

The moon sets, over hills cold and unfamiliar.
I shut off the radio, and hear the sea-roar of the freeway.
Who is this man I dreamed up?
I cork the bottle, and get up and lock the door.

Richard Tillinghast

***************



RL

No Turn On Red

It's enough to make the moon turn its face
the way these poets take a kind of bubble bath
in other people's pain. I mean, sure, the dumpsters
of our lives are filling with more mistakes
than we could ever measure. Whenever we reach into
the pockets of hope we pull out the lint of despair.
I mean, all I have to do is lift the eyelids
of the stars to see how distant you could become.
But that doesn't mean my idea of form is a kind of
twelve step approach to vision. I mean, I don't want
to contribute to the body count which, in our major journals,
averages 13.7 deaths/poem, counting major catastrophes and wars.
I'm not going to blame those bodies floating down some
river in Rwanda or Bosnia on Love's failures. But really,
it's not the deaths in those poems, it's the way Death arrives in a tux
and driving a Lamberghini then says a few rhymed words
over his martini. It's a question of taste, really,
which means, a question for truth. I mean, if someone
says some beastly person enters her room the way Hitler
entered Poland I'd say she's shut her eyes like a Kurdish
tent collapsing under a gas attack, it makes about
much sense. Truth is too often a last line of defense,
like the way every hospital in America keeps a bag of
maggots on ice to eat away infection when the usual
antibiotics fail. The maggots do a better job
but aren't as elegant. Truth is just bad taste, then?
Not really. Listen to this: "Legless Boy Somersaults
Two Miles To Save Dad', reads the headline from Italy
in Weekly World News, a story that includes pictures
of the heroic but bloody torso of the boy. "Twisted
like a pretzel," the story goes on. Bad taste or
world class gymnastics? Which reminds me. One afternoon
I was sitting in a bar watching the olympics -- the singles
of synchronized swimming -- how can that be true?
If that's so, why not full contact javelin? Uneven
table tennis? The 1500 meter dive? Even the relay dive?
Someone's going to say I digress? Look, this is a satire
which means, if you look up the original Latin, "mixed dish,"--
you have to take a bite of everything. True, some would
argue it's the word we get Satyr from, but I don't like
to think of myself as some cloven hoofed, horny
little creature sniffing around trees. Well, it's taste, remember.
Besides my satire is set while waiting at Love's traffic
light, which makes it unique. So, I was saying you have
to follow truth's little detours -- no, no, it was taste,
the heroic kid twisted like a pretzel. Pretzels are
metaphysical. Did you know a medieval Italian monk
invented them in the year 610 in the shape of crossed,
praying arms to reward his parish children.
I like children," said W.C. Fields -- "if they're properly
cooked." Taste, and its fellow inmate, truth -- how do we
measure anything anymore? Everyone wants me to stick
to a few simple points, or maybe no point at all,
like the tepid broth those new formalists ladle into their
demi tasse. How can we write about anything -- truth,
love, hope, taste, when someone says the moment, the basis
of all lyric poetry, of all measure and meter, is just
the equivalent of 10 billion atomic vibrations of the cesium
atom when its been excited by microwaves. Twilight chills
in the puddles left by evening's rain. The tiny spider
curled on the bulb begins to cast a huge shadow. No wonder
time is against us. In 1953, Dirty Harry, a "nuclear device,"
as the phrase goes, blossomed in Nevada's desert leaving
more than twice the fallout anyone predicted.
After thirty years no one admits the measurements.
Truth becomes a matter of "duck and cover." Even Love
refuses to come out of its shelter. In Sarajevo,
Dedran Smailovic plays Albinoni’s Adagio outside
the bakery for 22 days where mortars killed 22,
and the papers are counting the days till the sniper
aims. You can already see the poets lined up
on poetry's dragstrip revving up their 22 line elegies
in time for the New Yorker deadline, so to speak.
Vision means, I guess, how far down the road of your
career you can see. And numbers not what Pope meant
by rhythm, but $5 per line. Pythagoras (b. 570 BC)
thought the world was made entirely of numbers. Truth,
he said, is the formula, and we are just the variables.
But this is from a guy who thought Homer's soul was
reborn in his. Later, that he had the soul of a peacock.
Who could trust him? How do we measure anything?
Each time they clean the standard kilogram bar in Sevres,
France, it loses a few atoms making everything else appear
a little heavier. That's why everything is suddenly
more somber. Love is sitting alone in a rented room
with its hangman's rope waiting for an answer
that's not going to come. All right, so I exaggerate, and
in bad taste. Let's say Love has put away its balance,
tape measure and nails and is poking around in its tin
lunch pail. So how can I measure how much I love you?
Except the way the willow measures the universe.
Except the way your hair is tangled among the stars.
The way the turtle's shell reflects the night's sky.
I'm not counting on anything anymore. Even the foot --
originally defined as the shoe length of whatever king
held your life, which made the poets scramble around
to define their own poetic feet. And truth is all this?
That's why it's good to have all these details as
a kind of yardstick to rap across the fingers
of bad taste. "I always keep a supply of stimulants
handy, " said Fields, "in case I see a snake;
which I also keep handy." In the end, you still need
something to measure, and maybe that's the problem
that makes living without love or truth so much pain.
I'd have to be crazy. Truth leaves its fingerprints
on everything we do. It's nearly 10 PM. Crazy.
here comes another poet embroidering his tragic
childhood with a few loosely lined mirrors.
I'm afraid for what comes next. The birds' warning
song runs up and down the spine of the storm. Who says
any love makes sense? The only thing left is
this little satire and its faceless clock for a soul.
You can't measure anything you want. The basis of all
cleverness is paranoia. 61% of readers never finish
the poem they start. 31% of Americans are afraid to speak
while making love. 57% of Americans have dreamt
of dying in a plane crash. One out of four
Americans is crazy. Look around at your three
best friends. If they're okay, you're in trouble.

Richard Jackson

***************



Richard Jackson is the author of 9 books of poems, most recently Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems (Autumn House, 2004), Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2003), Heartwall (University of Massachusetts, 2000), winner of the Juniper Prize, Svetovi Narazen (Slovenia, 2001), a limited edition small press book, Falling Stars: A Collection of Monologues (Flagpond Press, 2002) and Richard Jackson: Greatest Hits (2004). His own poems have been translated into a dozen languages. He has edited two anthologies of Slovene poetry: The Fire Under the Moon and Double Vision: Four Slovenian Poets (Aleph, 1993), is editor of Poetry Miscellany and Mala Revija, a journal of Slovene culture and literature as well as an eastern Europoean Chapbook Series. The author of a book of criticism, The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary American Poetry (Agee Prize), and Acts of Mind: Interviews With Contemporary American Poets (Choice Award), he has had essays and reviews in Georgia Review, Verse, Contemporary Literature, Boundary 2, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner aamong numerous journals and anthologies. In 2000 he received the Order of Freedom Medal for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans, awarded by the President of Slovenia. He has Guggenheim, NEA, NEH, Witter-Bynner and Fulbright Fellowships, 5 Pushcart Prizes and awards for excellence in teaching from UT-Chattanooga and Vermont College's M.F.A. program.

***************



RL

Surrender

Supine under branches
and blossoms, eavesdropping
on a hummingbird,
the high-pitched flutter
of her seed-sized heart.
Drunk on the scent of apricots.
My spine's thirty-three stones
lined up on the new grass.

I'm a rosy dot on a map's
patch of green, my naked toes
pointing east below gobbets
of buttery sun. Between journeys,
obstacles: water and rock, iron
and chalk dust, the white ribs
of the fence and the gopher's
freshly dug holes.

Petals in tatters on my bare thigh.
the screen door's wheeze
doesn't bother me, the news
still rolled in its red rubber band.

Right now I'm nowhere and no one
cares. Nothing needs me but the dirt
beneath me. The sky gazes down
and doesn't see me. Even the wind

is like a mother, thinking of her lover,
as she parts my hair.

Dorianne Laux

*****************



Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake (1990) What We Carry (1994) Smoke (2000) and Superman: The Chapbook (2008). She taught for 15 years at the University of Oregon in Eugene and since 2004, at Pacific University's Low-Residency MFA Program. She and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, recently moved to Raleigh where she joins the faculty at North Carolina State University.

*****************



RL

Flyover State

Madame Blavatsky, the fraudulent
founder of modern theosophy,
prevaricated blithely, claiming
Jesus reached the Himalayas.
He didn’t suffer altitude sickness.
Ascent (she said) was in his blood.
He came down
holier
than he went up.
        In 1994
when my Sanskritist flatmate
shot up, he went to Blavatsky’s peaks—
not the real Himalayas but the fakes
painted on fin de
sicle screens.
Our kitchen
smelled of barf and needle-bleach,
so after dark I’d walk outside
down Greenwood Avenue
under lushly brainy blooming trees.
My Doc Martens stamped
ahead of me. My empty shoulder hurt
where its book bag should be.
        And always,
flying low, like a raven:
my half-done dissertation.
The university’s spires flared,
lit by lights meant to scare
black teenagers. Its mock-Oxford
turrets acted older than they were.
If I walked all the way to the quad,
my key-card would admit me.
        So instead I looped
around 52nd to Woolworth’s,
where the cashiers, Ruth and Rotunda,
let half-price parakeets fly
free among the shoppers.
Woolworth’s was the opposite
of history, its liquids and plastics
on the verge of being swept
into some stranger’s future
suitcase, shower, tragedy—who could say?
Blavatsky was right: truth mattered less
and less every day, and the discount
parakeets, green with scabby claws,
moved downward to darkness
behind racks of inexplicably
gigantic white bras. Who could fill
such cups? Is there no God but God?

Angela Sorby

***************



RL

Poem Talking In Its Sleep About a Lake

The year Jeffrey's Shooting Star filled the marshland
of Mowich Lake with chaos, white bands
around the tube of each purple blossom called
hello there I say hello there please walk
around me as they clustered inside-out. The long
filament tube, reflexed petals (usually five),
sticky anthers promising generations into infinitude
of Jeffreys. Your leaving is not easy
on the world. When I press tent stakes, when
I boil a mug of water, when I sit and stare:
no deer this evening, no tail twitching
the bear grass, no snorting at the lake;
my mind will not allow that flower to leave
the marshland but it has. I tried not to say
these words, but here they come: no remission,
no treatment, no telling the kids, quiet, dear,
go back to sleep. The year was 2002, I think,
and Jeffrey's Shooting Star let loose in my mind.
Every sticky anther extended toward the stigma.

Lilah Hegnauer

***************



Lilah Hegnauer’s Dark Under Kiganda Stars (Ausable Press, 2005) received honorable mention for the 2007 Library of Virginia Literary Award. She holds an MFA from the University of Virginia, and her poems have been published in The Kenyon Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Orion, The Drunken Boat, and So to Speak. She is the recipient of an Astraea Lesbian Writers Grant and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

***************




RL

Ice Fishing

From open water at the lake’s
unfrozen outlet, steam rises, a scrim
dim enough to turn the sun as round as a dime,

though it’s still so bright across snow,
so low in the sky it rings
with a ball-peen clang behind his eyes,

each time he looks up
from his augured hole in the ice.
Wind spins a spider-silk filament

of frost from the dorsal fin of a quick frozen
blueblack, and blood spots
the snow around the hole.

From the darkening woods
two coyotes pipe and prate, the late
mouse they toss aloft in play, the same

they’ll squabble over soon. And soon
the sun will sink an edge in the ridge,
and the wind will chase its tail

behind the trees. Then the man will stand
and take his stool and the tool
for the ice and the tool

for the fish and the fish and leave.
Only the low, late coals of his fire left behind,
pinkening down toward pure black ash,

the dark below blowing a kiss to the night,
the hole scabbing over already with ice,
by the blood-freckled cheek of the evening snow.

Robert Wrigley

**************



Robert Wrigley was born February 27, 1951, in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up in Collinsville, a coal mining town. He received his B.A. (with honors) in English Language & Literature at Southern Illinois University in 1974, and his M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Montana in 1976, where he studied with Madeline DeFrees, John Haines, and Richard Hugo.

His collections of poetry include Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); Lives of the Animals (2003); Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and Lenore Marshall Award finalist; What My Father Believed (1991); Moon in a Mason Jar (1986); and The Sinking of Clay City (1979).

His work has also been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals. Wrigley's awards and honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho State Commission on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, and two Pushcart Prizes. From 1987 until 1988 he served as the state of Idaho's writer-in-residence.

Wrigley lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, and their children, on the Clearwater River in Idaho. He has taught at Lewis-Clark College, at the University of Oregon, twice at the University of Montana, where he returned to hold the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry, and at Warren College. He is the Director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Idaho.


**************



RL