216

…   I’ll take this bottle with me when I go. Not now. Some hiker dropped it passing on Impossible Hill, a mountainside of stone made visible by human heels and hooves Sharp and steep. Don’t fall! Below is Walnut Run Above, the power line. Buzzards one by one take off from steel and wire…

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My Girl, My Girl

… The song I sing in the video is from Leadbelly. He called it “Black Girl.” I’ve changed some of the lyrics and added the end from another song, “Prettiest Train,” which Odetta sang on her Carnegie Hall record album. I loved both of these songs when I was a teenager. “Black Girl” was one…

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Sonnet 44

… I hear Dad’s chainsaw echo down the fieldcutting firewood for December’s stove. Herknife in hand Mom chops the cabbage she’ll sealin jars pouring boiling water overit first with a tablespoon of sea salt.Come November she’ll have her sauerkraut.Summer yet, but going, and not the faultof summer that it goes. I want to shout“Don’t go!”…

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O Pretty Self

O Pretty Self A snake curled in the sunfeels my shadow come and goesripples over stones. The stream falls downand oozes out of mossand mud where a deer’s stepped. No, I won’t pick this violet.Let it clutch the cracking rockblue out of yellow from a black dot. When I leave these woods to workand stammer…

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36

  36 I see how strong a fragile thing can be. Look! A butterfly comes fluttering over its own reflection hovering out in the middle of a pond so deep and close you’d think no insect strength could last the distance needed to reach land, yet up it goes above the wide-mouthed bass that jumps…

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232

… Fluttering robins louder than my singingare violent on the lawn where they’re fightingover a worm—No!—I’m wrong. As quietas a junkie gets sticking the needle in no matter what funny business preceded it—Like a junkie suddenlysilent one bird enters the other shooting the life force so still it makes me stopplaying to watch what I…

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