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Table of Contents

BOOKS BY CAROL MUSKE

POETRY

Red Trousseau (1993)

Applause (1989)

Wyndmere (1985)

Skylight (1981)

Camouflage (1975)

NOVELS

(as Carol Muske Dukes)

Saving St. Germ (1993)

Dear Digby (1989)

ESSAYS

Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography and the Shape of the Self (1997)

This book is dedicated to my mother and father.
And to David and Annie: my home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Cal Bedient and Louise Glck for their close, insightful readings of these poems in manuscript. I would also like to thank Michelle Latiolais, David St. John, and Molly Bendall for invaluable critical advice, moral support, and friendship, for which I am daily, deeply grateful.

Also, special thanks to Paul Slovak for patient editing and understanding about last-minute changesditto Barbara Campo! Thanks to Gerald Costanzo for unflagging support of my work and the gift of a hardcover. And to Kim Witherspoon and Maria Massie: all my gratitude and admiration. And Susie Dubs: thanks, my Basil! My deep appreciation to Barbara Kassel, to Joe Byrne, and to Judith Hall. Thanks to Creighton University for their distinguished alumna citation. Thanks to the University of Southern California for the Phi Kappa Phi award and to Nancy Malone, O.S.U., for the pilot fellowship of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life.

Some of the poems in this collection first appeared in the following periodicals:

The American Poetry Review: Afterwards, Blue Kashmir, 74, Box, Dream, Lucifer, Miracles, My Sister Not Painting, 1990, The Painters Daughter, Red Trousseau, To the Muse, and Wyndmere, Windemere

Antaeus: Census, Child with Six Fingers, Chivalry, Fireflies, and Skylight

The Antioch Review: Coral Sea, 1945, and Monks House, Rodmell

The Best Verse: Ideal

Colorado Review: Barra de Navidad: Envoi

Columbia: Blood Hour

Esquire: Swansong

Field: An Octave Above Thunder, poems 1 to 5 and 7 to 10, August, Los Angeles, Lullaby, Last Take (Unsent Letter 4,) Prague: Two Journals (1970, 1990), and Worry

The George Washington Review: In-Flight Flick

The Little Magazine: Freezing to Death

Los Angeles Magazine: Like This

The Missouri Review: De-icing the Wings and Immunity

Moon and Lion Tailes: Cheap Scent

The Nation: Pacemaker

New England Review / Bread Loaf Quarterly: China White and Ransom

The New Yorker: Golden Retriever, The Invention of Cuisine, Skid, Summer Cold, Surprise, and War Crimes

The Painted Bride Quarterly: Hyena

The Paris Review: Having Fled the Cite Universitaire (Paris, 1970)

Ploughshares: Anna, David, and A Fresco

Poetry: Little L.A. Villanelle and Sounding

Poetry Miscellany: The Way a Swan Turns

River Styx: Unsent Letter 2

The Snails Pace Review: Theories of Education

Solo: Blue Rose

Three Penny Review:Pediatrics

Verse: Ideal

The Western Humanities Review: At the School for the Gifted

Woman Poet: Special Delivery to Curtis: The Future of the World

The Yale Review: Field Trip

Benares and the section We Bought Amish Quilts from An Octave Above Thunder appeared in Slate, the on-line magazine of Microsoft, Inc.

A number of the selections were reprinted in the anthologies, The Best American Poetry 1992, edited by Charles Simic and David Lehman (Scribner, 1992); Mothersongs: Poems For, By and About Mothers, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Diana OHehir (Norton, 1995); One Hundred Great Poems by Women: The Golden Ecco Anthology, edited by Carolyn Kizer (Ecco, 1995); Pushcart Prize XIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson (Pushcart Press, 1988); and Pushcart Prize XVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson (Pushcart Press, 1992).

NEW POEMS

LIKE THIS

Morituri te salutamus.
Los Angeles Times, 1927

Maybe its not the city you thought
it was. Maybe its flaws, like cracks
in freeway pylons, got bigger, caught
your eye, like swastikas on concrete stacks.

Maybe lately the dull astrologies of End,
Millennium-edge rant about world death
make sense. Look. Messages the dead send
take time to arrive. When the parched breath

of the Owens River Valley guttered out,
real voices bled through the black & white.
The newspaper ad cried, We who are about
to die salute you. Unarmed, uncontrite.

Gladiators: a band of farmers, entrenched.
And how many on the Empires side recognized
the bitter history of that bow? Greed drenches
itself in a single element, unsurprised.

Like strippers, spotlit. Tits and asses
flash red-gold, while jets shriek above.
Rim-shot. History, like a shadow, passes
over a city impervious as a bouncers shove

to dreams. Images tell you whats imaginable.
Here comes another ton. We bathe in
whats re-routed from the source: a fable
of endless water in a dipper made of tin.

The futures in fact a few images refusing to fit
anywhere. For some: heads on pikes, sky-fires.
For others: a kids painting of a green horse, its
bridle fallen behind. This city never seems to tire

of stupid prophecy, yet seeks no past, ways
Time talks to itself, salutes us as it dies.
We were taught to think: like that, like this. Days
of nights, not seeing the similes power. It tries

to link the unlike and the like, I said aloud
to my special students, so-called troubled youth
whod packed guns & gang caps. On campus, proud
to scare the shit out of everybody. The truth

is, they wrote offkey, like weird singing. So
it was quiet as one of them read his analogy:
The bullet-holesover my door, his voice low,
look like a peacock tail, a peacock fan. He

whod never seen a shuddering strut of quills,
hadnt seen desire in that many eyes, said I
dont think like anybody. And why? He kills,
hes a kid. But look, he sees what we die

from not seeinghow different beauty opens
its different eyes. The expanse unfolds,
many-eyed, iridescent, it holds. Unbroken,
salutes you. The fiery gaze turns gold.

SLED

The child on the sled shields her eyes
against the moving glare of snow

looking ahead to where shes been,
growing up impatient for the precipitous

slide of thought into thought.
White fires divide: trees again.

So the landscape is never more
than an exit (the sled veering)

into beauty, not a path to person,
place, the plural surface of touch.

Red paint arrow slashed on pine,
red runners, a reflection, but no

shadow of a wolf stretching, no violin,
just the wing of the arched board, the

child doubling the frozen rope over
her knuckles, kneeling, then lying flat

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