The birches stand in their beggar's row:
Each poor tree
Has had its wrists nearly
Torn from the clear sleeves of bone,
...
You were never told, Mother, how old Illyawas drunk
That last holiday, for five days and nights
He stumbled through Petersburg forming
...
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
...
Very pragmatic closets of falling water,
bath and sewer, complex
dwellers eating black bread,
...
The General's men sit at the door. Her eyes
Are fat with belladonna. She's naked
Except for the small painted turtles
...
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.
...
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
...
The vase was made of clay
With spines of straw
For strength. The sunbaked vase
...
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
...
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
...
The snow fence could be seen
leaving a woman who's eating cold noodles.
It's not made of abandoned bee boxes
...
The Baltic Sea froze in 1307. Birds flew north
From the Mediterranean in early January.
There were meteor storms throughout Europe.
...
Our clothes are still wet from wading
The Chickamunga last evening.
There is heavy frost. We have
...
The morning's mail rises up the stairwell
with its simple breakfast; postage from Gambia
rivaling the khaki toast and jam, pomegranate
...
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
...
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—
...
Loosening spiders across the inert baritone
of transfictional time,
he describes the exact absence
of moment in equilibrium,
...
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
like immense museum masterpieces
...
Norman Dubie (born April 10, 1945 Barre, Vermont) is an American poet. He is the author of more than eighteen books, often assuming historical personae in his works. Dubie's poetry has been included in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, FIELD, and Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts. A recipient of numerous fellowships (including the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation) and awards, Dubie is a graduate of Goddard College and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University, in Tempe AZ, where he is Regents Professor of English. The Tucson-based band Calexico have stated that Dubie's poetry was very influential on their album Carried to Dust, particularly the song "Two Silver Trees".)
February: The Boy Breughel
The birches stand in their beggar's row:
Each poor tree
Has had its wrists nearly
Torn from the clear sleeves of bone,
These icy trees
Are hanging by their thumbs
Under a sun
That will begin to heal them soon,
Each will climb out
Of its own blue, oval mouth;
The river groans,
Two birds call out from the woods
And a fox crosses through snow
Down a hill; then, he runs,
He has overcome something white
Beside a white bush, he shakes
It twice, and as he turns
For the woods, the blood in the snow
Looks like the red fox,
At a distance, running down the hill:
A white rabbit in his mouth killed
By the fox in snow
Is killed over and over as just
Two colors, now, on a winter hill:
Two colors! Red and white. A barber's bowl!
Two colors like the peppers
In the windows
Of the town below the hill. Smoke comes
From the chimneys. Everything is still.
Ice in the river begins to move,
And a boy in a red shirt who woke
A moment ago
Watches from his window
The street where an ox
Who's broken out of his hut
Stands in the fresh snow
Staring cross-eyed at the boy
Who smiles and looks out
Across the roof to the hill;
And the sun is reaching down
Into the woods
Where the smoky red fox still
Eats his kill. Two colors.
Just two colors!
A sunrise. The snow.
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