A Meadow Poem by Lucie Brock-Broido

What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one
Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will.

Yes, yes, of course it is an "Art." Of course I will not be here
Long, not the way the percentages are going now.

He might have been
Half-beautiful in a certain optic nerve

Of light, but legible only at particular
Less snowy distances. I was fixed on

The poplar and the dread. The night was lung-colored

And livid still—he would have my way
With me. In this district of late

Last light, indicated by the hour of
The beauty of his neck, his face Arabian in contour

Like a Percheron grazing in his dome of grass,

If there is a god, he is not done
Yet, as if continuing to manhandle the still lives of

The confederate dead this far north, this time of year, each
Just a ghostly reason now. There are reasons: One,

Soon the wind will blow Pentecostal with the power of group prayer.

Two: the right to bear arms. Three: you did not find my empathy
Supernatural, at the very least.

—Have you any ideas that are new?

I was fixed on the scythe and the harlequin, on the priggish
Butcher as he cuts the tender loin and

When I saw this spectacle, I wanted to live for a moment for
A moment. However inelegant it was,

It was what it might have been to be alive, but tenderly.

One thing. One thing. One thing:

Tell me there is
A meadow, afterward.