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Comandante Literario Supreme
Joined: Apr 2008 Posts: 2824 Location: Round Hill, VA
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 Re: National Book Critics Circle Awards for Poetry
Well, let's have a poem by Laura Kasischke - see if we like her poetry.
After Ken Burns
The beautiful plate I cracked in half as I wrapped it in tissue paper— as if the worship of a thing might be the thing that breaks it.
This river, which is life, which is wayfaring. This river, which is also sky. This dipper, full of mind, which is
not only the hysterical giggling of girls, but the trembling of the elderly. Not only
the scales, beaks, and teeth of creatures, but also their imaginative names (elephant, peacock) and their love of one another, the excited preparations they sometimes make for their own deaths.
It is as if some graceful goddess, wandering in the dark, desperate with thirst, bent down and dropped that dipper clumsily in this river. It floated away. Consciousness, memory, sensory information, the historians and their glorious war . . . The pineal gland, tiny pinecone in the forehead, our third eye: Of course
it will happen here. No doubt. Someday, here,
in this little house, they will lay the wounded side by side. The blood will run into the basement through the boards. Their ghosts are already here, along with the cracked plate wrapped in old paper in the attic,
and the woman who will turn one day at the window to see a long strange line of vehicles traveling slowly toward her door, which
she opens (what choice does she have?) although she has not yet been born.
_________________ “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.”
― Bertrand Russell
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