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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781556595684 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press |
Publication date: | 10/08/2019 |
Pages: | 96 |
Sales rank: | 1,201,644 |
Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE ANTI-GRIEF
Day after day of rain. A ticket straight to
the mild-mannered hell of rethinking whatever,
the drive to Econo-Foods: not a lot of grief in that.
You need staples-bread, rice, eggs.
Here's a list: almonds, yogurt, all the little
anti-griefs add up.
Did I tell you? my grandfather sings from the grave.
They have my old Philco here.
I know all about your world of godawful and too bad.
I keep driving. In rain. Some luck required. Stop light.
Flashy cars on both sides playing radios too loud.
Ear damage! I used to shout out the window,
my boy in the front seat trying hard to shrink, not to know
who is that crazy at the wheel.
Grandfather likes saying: what? Half-deaf even now.
Half a lot of things, anytime. Half, what gives?
giving way. If there is a we or a you or an I finally.
He'd cup an ear if he had an ear.
So it is, the first anti-grief, a feather he picked up.
My childhood, walking with
the oldest man I ever, 1874 his
start date. Alarm and Should Have, two roads
he would not cross, and Consequence
a street over, he ignored completely. Always
an eye out for the great
small peculiar.
A feather. Sometimes handed to me. Or he'd
oil a clock with it right off the curb.
Into a pocket.
THE CARNIVOROUS PLANTS
in exile, ganged up in this greenhouse of living ache
and want, shabby glassed-in room with a door
propped open under a scribbled please, keep locked
underlined times two. Who wrote that, what
guardian of the wordless deep to
abet these bullies on their bright faded stalks
breathing in my carbon, giving back
oxygen. The invisible exchange-love that first.
But trays and trays of dirt growing miniature time bombs,
tiny eyelids with a clamshell look, eyelashes if
brushed even slightly, they go for me. One clamps up
quick as I pull away. I'm its feed me right now, I'm prey
then a total wash-out, too big for its little, a tease.
Slowly it re-opens a wired-up watch on this ocean of
sunlit muggy air, me swimming through my so important
afternoon to supper, to sleep. What to dream at night-
who knows how ruthless a small empty creature can be
to swallow all anything that happens by, to give it
an afterworld, a shot, a slow dissolve.
I have eyelids. I have eyelashes that shut down tight.