Dubie - The Quotations of Bone

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We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.For my students Table of Contents

Prologue Speaking in Tongues Sitting in the baked boulder field, Jeremy called it a field of spuds, cactus tuft rather than shavings of cheddar. The water was good for this darker incline of the Superstitions. The Dutchman says one wing, one rock. You thought Tagores dress had a red pleated meridian just below his breasts.

These holy men who make poems with oil lamps disfiguring their faces, the nose cleaved like a dead Venetians slipper. The lips mocking a song of Cole Porters easy to love. You said so, pointing at the deserts full compass because the world turns its circumference into pond waters broken golden mean. Abulafia? Ive refused to anyone say exactlyhow, it a death, not the usual cribbageor begging a differencein socks gosh, I saidI do not want to hear it muchwas clear of, Jeremy thought, spuds. As if that could hurt anyone. But it did.

The Fallen Bird of the Fields I She sings to the worms in transit between the orchard and the ghost-hurtling glacier, the ta sa la of the stone dead, but in passage over a sack of coal and the basket of seed potatoes. It is the messenger bee, at last, carrying a green and copper scroll with the legitimate characters of naked apostasy written there in red and yellow pollen; stone dead in the branches, the apples have gone the beggar red of a pomegranate. Deer are grazing on the limestone ledges. This is the cipher of everyone leaving us. Not just with a fresh loneliness but with those eyes of potatoes for the only witnesses. II The red car crossed the snowfield chasing a black bear.

We ate our tuna sandwiches III with a dark beer and a shared cigarettefrom Quebec. You laughed because the bear ran while it shat. Something you said that I would expect from marigolds. The salad at the winter wedding. Of your two breasts I favored the one that was smaller that you deployed in a shameless act of ventriloquism. Just three short sentences in French. And an almost polar totality of punctuation.

IV First the acetylene snow, then rain blown across the black culvert, again everythings cold in deep-spun lockers of spider loss, the signing greek geometry It knows a sleep of heliumin stroking phobic realism: sunspotson a dark blue plate. Your feverrelenting with the nausea. Starbuck said these winter tapestries always focus like the white fields on a red boar draped from a long pole over the shoulders of peasant men deploring the children who are skating in the flooded medieval graveyards. V. THE CHEMIST OF THE ZERO DOLMEN The wind tugs at the loose tree line. Dark skiers push through fog the snow adjusts its many shrouds while blind sled dogs awaken beside the river. The birchesslice a dull sun. An orange canister of bread crumbs settles on the bottom of the river a laughter of lenses rinsing from glacial water. The birchesslice a dull sun. An orange canister of bread crumbs settles on the bottom of the river a laughter of lenses rinsing from glacial water.

The star threshold turns its reversed letter. The dream of the apothecarys dram with a further half scruple across a black sheet of paper. Traklwith his dish of green tea. The obligation, a broken ruby gammadion with two methyl radicals calling from the dolls house across the hill to Greta saying also to the brother that its the eccentricity of the cone that is killing Georg little by little VI Yes, Mother, it was a snowy day, Saturday. I bought a new yellow dress. At night I opened a cupboard and cans toppled out striking me in the jaw and left breast near the nipple. Its a pretty green and purple now.

I have the cable on with the volume down and Olivier, in a borrowed cloak, is wandering among his mens campfires, an anonymous droid. These men are moody and complicated with bravery, rather with thoughts that they might be dead, or worse, on Agincourts fields by late morning. Suddenly I realized that these young and middle-aged soldiers, these actors, as is the strange euphemism now for some soldiers, I understood that almost all of them, busy feigning a thoughtfulness about death, are, in fact, dead, lying there by their night fires with the lovely celluloid blue lights on the hillsides. It was depressing and I just walked off, disgusted with this world, its actors, to my kitchen bearing a large bruise in my breast. I hear you laughing. Your daughter. Jean. Jean.

VII Q was written before the war. STEARNS I limped down to the black canal just to see a frayed red braid of horsehair swim among stars and broken branches of paloverde. The sick turquoise bellies of deadly snakes changing, changing back in rain. I looked down to the distant 101 Loop where a dust storm caused a pileup burning alive a man and his three children, the smoke there since morning, a feint or sleight off a coroners cigar his Cuban cologne over the fathers burst stomach with undigested painkillers there like glistening fish roe, row all your poor wooden boats gently away from me, this old woman crippled with a bitter affection for these lost broken-pottery cultures that dug this canal a thousand years before the early morning and the dead children singing here comes the sun for their mothers breakfast. Shes in bed with influenza. Every cell in her body screams at every other cell. And she smiles.

God help her always. It is smoke-rise on Christmas day. VIII Well, Mother, again it is Wednesday. Beth has been sulking since Christmas. I wish I lived nearer to her. She seems to think some frogs, all bats, the bees, and a western snapping turtle are soon to be extinct.

It is, it would seem, her anxiety for our entire species. I said, yes well, good enough for us and thats when she hung up. Since then nothing but silence. I feel weve lived through this before? The A-bomb or Rachel Carsons birds dropping in the wickets of goldenrod? Its just so familiar. And boring as piss thats stood in a pot from early evening to late the next morning. Remember what it was like in the 40s.

Sleeping in Alice Codlins farmhouse. From her blueberry pancakes with raw milk to now our northern bats wearing a fungus like a mustache of cocaine.