Orphan, Indiana
AKRON SERIES IN POETRY
Copyright 2010 by The University of Akron Press
All rights reserved First Edition 2010 Manufactured in the United States of America. All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the Publisher, the University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.
14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lee, David Dodd.
Orphan, Indiana / David Dodd Lee. 1st ed.
p. cm. (Akron series in poetry)
ISBN 978-1-931968-83-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-931968-90-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS 3562. E 3383O77 2010
811.54 DC 22
2010012962
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.481984.
Cover: Photograph by David Dodd Lee. Used with permission.
Cover design: Amy Freels
Orphan, Indiana was designed and typeset by Amy Freels in Electra LT Standard, with Hypatia
Sans Pro display. Orphan, Indiana was printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by BookMasters of Ashland, Ohio.
Poems in Orphan, Indiana have appeared in:
Barn Owl Review: This is How It Sounds Before Real Things Start Happening & Saint Paul: A Hermeneutics; Field: 1999 (as I Cant Remember); Verse : Six Minutes (online version); and Zoland Poetry: Garlic Mustard, & Civilian Defense, 1942.
Contents
Heat stopped publishing 6 miles back
where the dcor was a door hanging free from a hinge.
Catherine Meng, Tonights the Night
Im speeding west somewhere in the top of Ohio or Indiana,
and to my right is the Arctic Circle, all white and scary.
Arthur Vogelsang, A Planet
It all starts with the sentence, chain
of lakes like your blushing neutrality
Houses in his little hand like dice
Then the windows reappear
I begin to pray in the dark
I stand up
Flashes of light like the moon
Headlights all over the highway
Blood falls off the antlers
The suburb is smothered in rain coats
Smoke curlicues out of a red brick chimney
Nobody says a word
Not one of the other dreaming passengers
In rows, as if injected by template
A Garden
There is a symmetry to this plan that is unacceptable
The flesh of her body
The flesh of the fruit
The most famous deleted page describes the serpent
Rolling downhill as a hoop, holding its tail in its mouth
five minutes till snack time
The snake tells the Missus to Go for it
He puts on Coldplay
The first-born son comes in October but his brother remains lost
Lightningone-thousand one, one-thousand twois followed by thunder
I should mention I have two missing wisdom teeth
Not removed from viewthey never materialized
You couldnt just turn on the tap
She moved with him, grinding her hips
Sometimes I dream about groundwater
The trees personalities become quantitative
at sundown
The hognose snake
Like the veins in her wrist
Lightly scored
I wanted to feel more realthe body of a lover
Night seeping into the boathouse
A calendar that doesnt go back
Cold, motionless well
Black nail polish
And then the thunder of a passing train
The sweetness of weeds
While the mercury bursts from its glass idea
Expect rain in the tri-state
Now buy a Slim Jim
We interrupt this program:
The Lord is the dead pen you shake back to life
They found him nailed
That rabbit in the lowing pines
Crying like a girl
This isnt the usual beach/woods stuff, an outer illumination
The father with his goose bumps
And terror
The sensuality of the melting Communion wafer
dripping down the inner thigh
(but enough John D. MacDonald)
The Jesuits walked home barefoot in the rain
They voted Paul off American Idol
The law of gravity
or the Rauschenberg-like penalty of law
like noticing her eyebrows
the symbol in an elevator for close door suddenly taken out of context
I saw Monogram
and that goat had eyes in the back of his head
He had these empty hands
A man-made spine where there was never any love
You, youre undignified
like a logo
or high interest rates
Far from here, mint overpowers the must of leaf decay
Oxygen
green as the inside of a glacier
And the mist nets hang full in the understory, like Spanish moss
I like how you thought you knew everything
Ornithological
birds have no soulswe know that
they dont do much grieving
they cant write a check
or a detective novel
What the hell is this thing, and a wren pecks at a shiny table fork
Its almost 9:30
and Im tired
I keep dreaming you and mother are trapped on a ship
surrounded by
a hundred other
burning ships
I was eight again
LossesIll get him
A monarch squeaks squeezing
out of its transparent chrysalis
The windows blew out of our house that summer
We have so many shadows
A car burning in the Parthenon
Barbie with her head on backwards
Google this aerial view of southern Indiana
Why not
Insinuated like stitches in the wiring
of your cell block
Stud finders in a tool kit with dental floss
Your mostly over-examined
Petrified
Lilacs
The wind continued to bang one shutter
I couldnt drive north fast enough
Daylight saving time
Subtract one hour from hangover
Not enough landscape in your sleeping pill
thats one problem
that it was free, like heavens enormous crybaby
Men
long neglected, stoned
super-attenuated
too much history in bourbon
too much Sepia Dream
his watch the size of a sundial, and the tassels
a bucket full of tip-ups
I prefer a cave thats cool and dreaming, a flooded removal
I met Larry Poons in an alley
and he gave me some centipedes
Now the deer talk quietly all night between raindrops
The kid who played cornet
the serious
problem
that developed in the late sixties
with saddle shoes
I mean the fascist blight as echo
