Oberlin College Press

FIELD #76 (Spring 2007)

Contents

Franz Wright		Passing Scenes (While Reading Basho) Out of Delusion
John Gallaher		Apostrophe to the Dead I Will Sing the Monster to Sleep & He Will Need Me
Diane Kirsten Martin		Conjugated Visits
Sarah Maclay		Hinge Black Lake Stand of Cut-Off Trees
Lee Upton		A Winter's Midsummer Night's Dream On the Position of Witches
Erin Gay		Malarkey
Ken Chen		What Is Night for I Cannot Hold It in My Hand?
Dore Kiesselbach		Glass
Lenore Mayhew		Leaving the Cathedral
Paul Legault		White Country
Frannie Lindsay		To a Timber Wolf
Eric Pankey		A Stone to Place on a Cairn
Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz translated by Natalie Shapero		She resists the idea of one state of being lasting until death
Renee Ashley		The Verbs of Desiring Spindle, Lathe
Molly Brodak		Lake-like
Jennifer Atkinson		Forest Architecture The Thinking Eye
Tomaz Salamun translated by Brian Henry		Offspring and the Baptism
Joanne Dwyer		Surrender
Timothy Kelly		Forearm Dissection, 1982 The Diagnosis of Noisy Knees
Daneen Wardrop		This one (I) to the edge of the sidewalk-crack We stream, black razzed
Michael Dickman		Wang Wei: Bamboo Grove
Matthew Gavin Frank		Mazisi's Widow Father-in-Law Agitprop
Gretchen Primack		March Milk Pail Market
Bob Hicok		After the Procedure Unknown Some of My Zoo A Record of Events Exactly as They Occurred
Michael Teig		Where I Come From
Tomas Transtromer translated by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassi		April and Silence Silence
Jean Valentine		Maria Gravida The Rose

Poetry 2007: Five Review-Essays
David Young		Miroslav Holub and the Poetics of Impurity (Miroslav Holub, Poems Before and After)
Dave Lucas		For Beste of Boon and Blood (Robin Robertson, Swithering)
Pamela Alexander		Altarwise, Aslant (Joan Houlihan, The Mending Worm)
Anthony Cuda		What Matters Most (Czeslaw Milosz, Selected Poems: 1931-2004)
DeSales Harrison		Heraclitean Rhapsodies (Charles Wright, Scar Tissue)

TO A TIMBER WOLF

For this I will need a blank page
a sky in absolute focus over the same few miles
of Alaska an airplane's simple shadow
and when I am ready
a grave full of snow that will never fall here
a thin mother wolf embracing
with purposeful forelegs a fresh carcass
from which she is gnawing the lean
chest muscle free for her pups
as the gunner's binoculars twist her gold eyes
close as a lover's though if he were anywhere near her
she would have no choice
but to strike with all eight hundred pounds per square inch
of the glorious teeth God gave her for tearing
so it is easier doing away with her from the air
not even killing really just training
the gun's eye making it see clear inside her
neutral heart and back out
to the pellet of blood on the dazzling sunlight
now making the gun want one of the beats
now making the other poor beat
be the bullet

--Frannie Lindsay

FATHER-IN-LAW AGITPROP

It's before coffee and after everything else.
A Sotho policewoman waves us to the side

of the road with a flashlight. 100 kilometers
behind us, Johannesburg goes to sleep. Corn,

purple, orange, weapon. Johann says,
Here, an hour in a cell is a death sentence.

He pulls his hands from the steering wheel,
lips trying to close over the end of a Peter

Stuyvesant. Handcuffs. A pig on a spit.
Gumboots in a souvenir shop. How quickly

we would sell our misery and our love. History
is this ear of corn, and this Giant Kingfisher,

licking blood from an eel. His wings
mock the Southern Cross and I pray

for Andromeda. The policewoman speaks
in mirrors, almost in retrospect,

side-views. Her wings
bury our brandies

with Johann's 100-rand note.
We will live today

to change our socks
and lower the parking brake,

this time, as if, into the earth.

--Matthew Gavin Frank