ZEBRA Even his skeleton Has stripes! —Glenna Luschei RHYME Slip some time inside the mind: ah, ever after, never. Nip a rind around a lime: a little trouble, later. Lip a line into a rhyme: no problem, whatsoever.  —David Martinson ABOUT Facts about the iris Do not make the iris Open. Open your eyes. It's tomorrow. Call out for someone. —James Galvin WEIGHTS & MEASURES How heavy the weight of the world! Just now— On my shoulder— Enormous Butterfly. —Thomas McGrath MIDCONTINENT Something holds us here— call it the madness of phone lines, the pride of blizzards, the love of wheels and wind. Something holds us here, where roads don't ever seem to end. Our maps are letters home we don't know where to send. —Mark Vinz

UNTITLED I am not like you. But if you are not like you either, then I am like you. —Antonio Porchia, trans. Merwin I KNOW A MAN As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, —John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ's sake, look out where yr going. —Robert Creeley OUTSIDE FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA Along the sprawled body of the derailed Great Northern freight car, I strike a match slowly and lift it slowly. No wind. Beyond town, three heavy white horses Wade all the way to their shoulders In a silo shadow. Suddenly the freight car lurches. The door slams back, a man with a flashlight Calls me good evening. I nod as I write good evening, lonely And sick for home. —James Wright

TRICKSTER Crow, in the new snow, You caw, caw Like crazy. Laugh. Because you know I’m a fool Too, like you Skimming over the thin ice To the war going on All over the world. —Joy Harjo MIDWEST CORRECTION FLUID The first thing We’ll do Is white out That line Between North And South Dakota. —Steve Ward One Home Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world. Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code. We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God. The light bulb that hung in the pantry made a wan light, but we could read by it the names of preserves— outside, the buffalo grass, and the wind in the night. A wildcat sprang at Grandpa on the Fourth of July when he was cutting plum bushes for fuel, before Indians pulled the West over the edge of the sky. To anyone who looked at us we said, "My friend"; liking the cut of a thought, we could say "Hello." (But plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.) The sun was over our town; it was like a blade. Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms. Wherever we looked the land would hold us up. —William Stafford Cuba, 1962 When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill and spreads his red-gold wings, I wake, thinking it is the sun and call Juanita, hearing her answer, but only in my mind. I know she is already outside, breaking the cane off at ground level, using only her big hands. I get the machete and walk among the cane, until I see her, lying face-down in the dirt. Juanita, dead in the morning like this. I raise the machete— what I take from the earth, I give back— and cut off her feet. I lift the body and carry it to the wagon, where I load the cane to sell in the village. Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake, tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane; it is grief. If you eat too much of it, you want more, you can never get enough. —Ai AFTER A LONG TIME the halves of the egg, impotence, slide into each other on waxed feet and the wait is over. The seam between my legs basted with hair tears apart, as your blue, flannel spoon slips inside, digs out the pieces of cracked shell and lays them on my thighs, like old china plates made too thin for holding anything but love. —Ai Sonnet:  The Poet at Seven And on the porch, across the upturned chair, The boy would spread a dingy counterpane Against the length and majesty of the rain, And on all fours crawl under it like a bear To lick his wounds in secret, in his lair; And afterwards, in the windy yard again, One hand cocked back, release his paper plane Frail as a May fly to the faithless air. And summer evenings he would whirl around Faster and faster till the drunken ground rose up to meet him; sometimes he would squat Among the bent weeds of the vacant lot, Waiting for the dusk and someone dear to come And whip him down the street, but gently, home. —Donald Justice	My Sister’s Sonnet Was Due Tuesday And I said Okay, I’ll help, but you have to think what it’s about. Well, like all poems of the planet, you know, what else? Sure, but what do we know about that? We’ve got everyone we love under one roof. We’ve never even seen—The heck we haven’t. What about Mrs. Beals’ dead baby by God in that box? I got my pencil going: “Barely two feet of pine planks…” No, put maple. Hey, it’s a sound thing we’re after. “The lid Mrs. Beals leaned to lift— barely two feet of pine planks nailed tight around her great dead gift.” Wait, hold on, we can’t say that. She’s a real person, she knows us. Don’t let’s mention any names. —Nance Van Winckel The Red wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens —W.C. Williams EPITAPH An old willow with hollow branches slowly swayed his few high bright tendrils and sang: Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood’s edge. —W.C. Williams BLIZZARD Snow: years of anger following hours that float idly down— the blizzard drifts its weight deeper and deeper for three days or sixty years, eh? Then the sun! a clutter of yellow and blue flakes— Hairy looking trees stand out in long alleys over a wild solitude. The man turns and there— his solitary track stretched out upon the world. ——W.C. Williams The Lip: a gypsy cab. The date is fried, mounts wrong ear. Don’t attract bombed gondola mucked in pad thai. Where’s that poor scuzz cooling? Furry den to coop, next to fickle marble cage. —Thomas Fink Animal Acts A bear who eats with a silver spoon. Two apes adept at grave-digging. Rats who do calculus. A police dog who copulates with a woman, Who takes undertaker's measurements. A bedbug who suffers, who has doubts About his existence. The miraculous Laughing dove. A thousand-year-old turtle Playing billiards. A chicken who Cuts his own throat, who bleeds. The trainer with his sugar-cubes, With his chair and whip. The evenings When they all huddle in a cage, Smoking cheap cigars, lazily Marking the cards in the new deck.         —Charles Simic
UNTITLED The cold is a good counselor, but it is cold. —Antonio Porchia, trans. Merwin		A Blind Woman She had turned her face up into a rain of light, and came on smiling. The light trickled down her forehead and into her eyes. It ran down into the neck of her sweatshirt and wet the white tops of her breasts. Her brown shoes splashed on into the light. The moment was like a circus wagon rolling before her through puddles of light, a cage on wheels, and she walked fast behind it, exuberant, curious, pushing her cane through the bars, poking and prodding, while the world cowered back in a corner. —Ted Kooser

aple. two feet of pine planks...at? We'

A SERIES OF POEMS BY ANNE CARSON

Apostle Town

After your death.
It was windy every day.
Every day.
Opposed us like a wall.
We went.
Shouting sideways at one another.
Along the road.
It was useless.
The spaces between us.
Got hard.
They are empty spaces.
And yet they are solid.
And black and grievous.
As gaps between the teeth.
Of an old woman.
You knew years ago.
When she was.
Beautiful the nerves pouring around in her like palace fire.

Love Town

She ran in.
Wet corn.
Yellow braid.
Down her back.

Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking

Their faces I thought were knives.
The way they pointed them at me.
And waited.
A hunter is someone who listens.
So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon.
Out of his hand and impales.
Itself.

Town of Spring Once Again

"Spring is always like what it used to be."
Said an old Chinese man.
Rain hissed down the windows.
Longings from a great distance.
Reached us.

Bride Town

Hanging on the daylight black.
As an overcoat with no man in it one cold bright.
Noon the Demander was waiting for me.

Town on the Way through God's Woods

Tell me.
Have you ever seen woods so.
Deep so.
Every tree a word does your heart stop?
Once I saw a cloud over Bolivia so deep.
Mountains were cowering do you ever?
Look in so quick you see the secret.
Word inside the word?
As in an abandoned railway car.
One winter afternoon I saw.
The word for "God's woods."

HOME

I like your word for certain among us: “aliens.”

That's what we are, you said,

gliding in your red car over the snow,

taking me home.

*

And your favorite dissertation on death: one day we just cool off.

Cool Off, you kill me.

I wonder you circle me the way that you circle me.

Your soft black brush brushing snow from the car,

till each white window, like a light,

goes out.

—Darlene Drummond

Great Age of Shoes

I try to believe something nice

about these places which nobody planned. Which money planned.

I work on myself. I feel near-tenderness

for the lunch-break people in line at McDonalds,

for the hormone-infested, mass-market carcasses we’ll eat,

for the cheery little lights and bright waste and hopefulness of the really big malls.

I know the helplessness of families

shopping for sheets and cameras and earnest, outrageous, specialized shoes,

manufactured in sweat shops somewhere overseas.

This is truly, by the way, have you noticed? a Great Age of Shoes, a good decade or more

of feature-loaded, petro-chemical soles,

and they make us look all feet. They make us look like babies, in fact, all ga-ga

at what holds us up. Infants just recently

up off the ground. Ok, we’re not going anywhere, surely we recognize

that, but tenderness might.

—Darlene Drummond