New
& Selected Poems:
The Life Cycle
of Moths
Winner
of the 2008 North American Review's James Hearst Poetry
Prize
Sometimes I wonder why she didn’t
kill us
when she had the chance.
Why she didn't smoke or drink,
or take the drugs, fashionable then.
Why she didn't drive the car
into guardrails, embankments —
bursting her belly
against skull of steering wheel.
Somehow it happened,
and if you could have seen inside her,
you would have seen us:
small, woven into her underbelly,
miniature women still without fur,
moth-hands clutched together,
praying even then.
Dead Horse Trail
—
The Alaskan
Klondike, 1898
Winner
of the 2007 Gabehart Prize for Poetry
One ton of goods per person:
supplies to start a life
hauled by hand, sled or horses,
fifteen hundred steps in glacial ice,
a slow stampede of pick-ax and sewing machine.
Three thousand horses dead along the way,
small price to pay for gold and good luck.
Whipped by ice, snow, and stick
through slush and stink
of mud, man and beast,
they did not rest for winter,
did not pause as glaciers do;
their bones splayed in rocky passes
white wings – the bowl of the rib cage
overturned in the snow.
Some walked to the ledge,
stepped slowly over
hooves cleaving air for an instant
dark against snow,
then striking rock:
the accordion of bone
breaking in small syllables.
Laurel County
from "A Wild
Region" -
This poem first appeared in "New Southerner",
Volume 2, Issue 3, June/July 2006
There must have been times
Kentucky seemed a life sentence,
a dark-veined monster burning coal in her belly,
the coughs that stained your linens black
no matter how many times you bleached them back
by the creek where you caught crawdads for supper.
You tell me of life but do not mention hunger,
you speak instead of land: tramping the fields in the wake
of your father,
finding a fishing hole or story, and the last time you saw
him,
Pappaw told you how Granddaddy got killed by a train,
cut in two on his way to the Hensley place -
this, during Prohibition, and a man did what he could.
Your mother canned beans and berries
from the share-cropped fields behind the house.
I remember the jam, thick and expensive on Wonder Bread.
I never understood why you'd fix me with thundercloud eyes
if I did not finish my piece,
your Cherokee granny's picture glaring from the other room.
You made a kite for me once, weaving far into the night
a red tailed hawk with scarlet ribbons streaming like entrails
against the gray Kentucky sky.
I ran and ran,
legs fighting my lungs -
could not let it fall.
You were on the hilltop - skirt taut,
caught between your legs, signaling something,
I could not make out what,
the kite obscuring my vision -
the wind would catch it, then let it fall.
Harlan County
from
"A Wild Region" -
This poem first appeared in "New Southerner",
Volume 2, Issue 3, June/July 2006
Stepping over the stones of my mother,
chicken bones, straw,
the cellar in which the man was found,
that man my grandfather
the day the sharecroppers left town,
their son shot dead –
the things whiskey’ll do to a man.
The woman who waited under the house at night,
counting ghosts and bobcats through lattice of leaves,
walking bare-boned lanes, toes
buried beneath blackened leaves –
no cause for worry
if you’ve walked every acre, planted every row.
Nothing can get you if you pay it no mind.
I tell you these things
so you’ll not mistake my actions for fear,
not think I do not know what makes a life,
what makes people do the things they do.
I know my fears – I’ve named them,
counted them out one by one
like tarot cards, voodoo dolls:
birth,
death,
poverty,
obscurity,
that you will leave me,
or I will leave you.
The Politics of Wanting
from
"A Wild Region" -
This poem first appeared
in Slipstream #26
The government of lost souls,
the language of loneliness,
there is never enough.
She knows that now.
The man she married
leaves his keys in the door
as if planning an escape route
should he wake in the middle of the night
look over at her sleeping form,
decide his heart cannot last another day.
In the mornings he makes her coffee,
a small offering of peace.
Weeks go by without their touching;
moving past one another in hallways
they apologize for a brushed arm, elbow,
the hanging sorrow of a love grown cold.
She watches him with the horses,
how he grips their manes, racing against clouds.
He looks at her strangely,
she wonders if he can read her mind.
The vicious pruning of time,
the inept metaphor of sleep,
the grass-green beauty
of the way she moves beneath him
as he wills himself to other lands.
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