national poetry month issue || discovering fire
TRANSCRIPT
University of Northern Iowa
Discovering FireAuthor(s): Ellen BassSource: The North American Review, Vol. 288, No. 2, National Poetry Month Issue (Mar. -Apr., 2003), p. 4Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25126911 .
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NAR
ELLEN BASS
Discovering Fire
That was the way
I knew to know them, taking their vulnerable root into my body, the way a small child puts everything?
pebbles and keys, plastic cars?
into its mouth. I stuffed them in,
boys and men, one after the other,
like a gardener planting bulbs
in the tulip craze, wild to see each hybrid blossom, its vibrant
glossy petals. I wanted to learn
about love, how it would transform me,
gild my skin where I rubbed
up against it. I loved their eyes, like the earth flecked with mica
and in their depths, a fortune
of raw diamonds. Or like the sea
with the moon broken, scattered,
shards of rapture on the rippled surface.
Though it was brief
and left much chaos in its wake, I clung to the only science I knew.
Crude as it was, I squatted there
in the cold night, grunting,
stubbornly knocking rock against rock, bent on that spark.
LILIAN CRUTCHFIELD
Gayle, Descending
I think I had a son once?here
in this house on a gravel road.
Where I hang laundry, he whispers:
Let me leave you, let me leave you.
He stands in the grass, turns his head,
I think. I had a son. Once here,
he tells me how he held the deer
rifle to his mouth, tasted iron
where I hang laundry. He whispers:
Here is where I thought it over.
Alive, I am held to the mud.
I think I had a son once. Here
is the well I sit in, breathing,
dyed all through with night. Deeply stained.
Where I hang laundry, he whispers.
When I dream, he walks toward this dark?
it's thick?and I follow, I wade.
I think I had a son once. Here
where I hang laundry, he whispers.
SECOND & THIRD JAMES HEARST POETRY PRIZE
4 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW March-April 2003
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 16:00:23 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions