Norman Dubie

The birches stand in their beggar's row:
Each poor tree
Has had its wrists nearly
Torn from the clear sleeves of bone,
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You were never told, Mother, how old Illyawas drunk
That last holiday, for five days and nights

He stumbled through Petersburg forming
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for Allen


Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
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Mistress Adrienne, I have been given a bed with a pink dresser
In the hothouse
Joining the Concord Public Library: the walls and roof are
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Very pragmatic closets of falling water,
bath and sewer, complex
dwellers eating black bread,
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In the cold heavy rain, through
its poor lens,
a woman
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The General's men sit at the door. Her eyes
Are fat with belladonna. She's naked
Except for the small painted turtles
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Steam banks chugging out the brick autoclave
under the laundry room, screams rising up chutes
while the sergeant's leg is sawed off above the long sock.
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The island, you mustn't say, had only rocks and scrub pine;
Was on a blue, bright day like a blemish in this landscape.
And Charlotte who is frail and the youngest of us collects
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The vase was made of clay
With spines of straw
For strength. The sunbaked vase
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A winter evening at the cottage by the bay,
And I sat in the black and gold of the dead garden
Wrapped in blankets, eating my sister's suet pudding.
The fountain was wrapped in dirty straw and
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The first morning after anyone's death, is it important
To know that fields are wet, that the governess is
Naked but with a scarf still covering her head, that
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The snow fence could be seen
leaving a woman who's eating cold noodles.
It's not made of abandoned bee boxes
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The Baltic Sea froze in 1307. Birds flew north
From the Mediterranean in early January.
There were meteor storms throughout Europe.
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Our clothes are still wet from wading
The Chickamunga last evening.
There is heavy frost. We have
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The morning's mail rises up the stairwell
with its simple breakfast; postage from Gambia
rivaling the khaki toast and jam, pomegranate
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The bears are kept by hundreds within fences, are fed cracked
Eggs; the weakest are
Slaughtered and fed to the others after being scented
With the blood of deer brought to the pastures by Elizabeth's
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The illegal ditch riders of the previous night
Will deliver ice today.
The barbers up in the trees are Chinese.
They climb with bright cleats, bearing machetes—
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Loosening spiders across the inert baritone
of transfictional time,
he describes the exact absence
of moment in equilibrium,
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I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
like immense museum masterpieces
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