What Trenton makes, the world takes. What Nixon knew when Nixon knew it. First compulsive songbird, pre-dawn, abruptly halts. The air conditioner is constant unnoticed but never silent. You can hear the electricity in lightbulbs, faint crackling. Too bleary to imagine. How the river carves the city lost at night, trying to find my way across. Dog leaps for the stick, her own ballet, then loses interest, wanders off to sniff the grass. History as a function of curiosity. Of the forbidden, my three-year-old says "That makes me sad.
A table of contents from which I've been omitted. Room in which toupees outnumber beards. The firestorm sweeps left across the screen: I'm walking in a world you cannot imagine, having died so long ago. Dream of real estate. The sun emerges gradually through the woods.
The son emerges gradually through the woods. The present has not become a perfect copy, but rather an uneditable one. The boat sinks rapidly in the text. Try to capture the shape and impact of your cheekbones in words. From an airplane, the spokes of suburban mall this one in Princeton is T-shaped are indistinguishable from those of a minimum security prison but for the immense parking lot. Cardinals will take some getting used to. Dark-toned palette of The X-Files. XX Old stone inn, used by the Tories to plot the assault on Philadelphia, still serves rich veal medallions covered with crab meat, spinach and Hollandaise sauce.
Cardinals in the silver birch. Metronome of an old wind-up mantle clock. Your body beneath that new little night blouse, then my hand beneath that. An enclosed front porch converted to language. Each person I meet insists on telling me their "California story. Elf-like, a porcelain imitation of Santa's wife, the woman warns us of the "colored" districts this is Cat stops to stare at me, then turns and glides away.
Full moon in the dogwood. Petersburg and Moscow, a gang eight young men, two women has been murdering apartment owners in order to sell their apartments. I set the pager to vibrate. Driving endlessly along Bethlehem Pike, seeming to get no closer to familiar landmarks, I notice the sun starting to set in the East.
In the next room, the large formal dining room table is covered with thousands of pieces of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle little more than the rectangular outer rim is complete, an echo of the shape of the table, though two of the corners have begun to be filled in, clusters of two and three joined pieces dotting the center , but in this light at this angle and distance , it's impossible to tell what the image is, or even that one exists. Crow screaming in the trees. May you have a lawsuit in which you know you're right.
The problem with poetry is poets. Bone spurs grab the heart. First shrill roar of cardinals. This storm doesn't so much arrive and pass as it does gather and dissolve. The dog's paws as it crosses the hardwood floor. The rain stops but the trees still have to shed their water. House with two fire places in sight of one another. Telescope in the dining room. We imagine the bird's song as an expression of emotion.
Alone in the playground, dressed in a suit that doesn't quite fit, red shirt, black tie, stands the developmentally disabled boy atop the tall slide, vomiting. XXI Smidgens in the glass harass. Moment at which first bird starts to sing, impossible still visually to discern dawn's approach. To imagine Duncan's text is to envision Duncan. First dull light foretells a clouded dawn. Bear masks made from paper plates. Gradually, moving out, as the furniture and pictures disappear, the architecture of the room re-emerges as if hidden by use, bare potential, naked as any person, almost obscene.
Mockingbird gargles and growls. In the dream, I have the same conversation about the storage capacity of my laptop that I had last week with a teenage boy with the president of CompuCom. Realtor points to a crack in the stucco. Little boy dances to inaudible tune. Jungle gym as prototype, as personality inventory, the problem to be defined before it can be solved.
Day in which I drive three cars rental car's last driver obviously smoked. Owned now by a long succession of other people, the house in which I grew up has become a cipher, opaque object half-buried by bougainvillea. Sentences written long ago. Standing at the coast, horizon contained by fog. Sign on the door reads "Division of the Arts" but what I want is multiplication.
- UI Press | David Wagoner | A Map of the Night.
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Ratio of books to ideas is getting higher by the day. Her name is Cinnamon, her mother Teal. Baywatch Ken doll anatomically edited for content to fit your screen. Ceiling fan spins slowly. That the whole of one's life fits into one truck. Phone on the floor of an empty house, an echo to anything I say. Mold on the wall behind each bookcase, a kind of damp shadow.
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Aphids, like dandruff, on each leaf of the plum tree. Ham on foccacio, a bowl of tea.
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The clouds hung low. XXII Small boy in a seaman's cap reminds me suddenly of my own such hat at that age, cap my father left behind. A light fog promises to burn off. A week between homes. Boy's shout from the street stories below brings me out of my sleep instantly until I determine that all my children are here inside asleep. The absolute second you have the first opportunity in over a week to relax, to take a deep breath, give a sigh, you realize from its shallow painful wheeze that you've had bronchitis for days.
Seek out the path of most resistance. A splinter I thought would work itself out has instead infected the whole finger. Day that never happens. Day that I discover total allergy to this powder detergent, big welt-like rashes everywhere from my neck to the soles of my feet.
Follow the Author
Cardinal in the yard smaller than I expected. You live on the east coast now. When, on the car radio, they hit the baby-in-the-microwave story, I hit the button. Among the morning's rich cacophony of birdsong, pick out first one, then another, that sound completely unfamiliar, using each in turn as the foreground through which to hear the whole nearby crow entirely out of scale. Upstairs, footsteps pace back and forth, for which I construct my own imaginary narrative: The sky grows lighter before it starts to rain. I stand in an empty attic studio, wondering where to put the desk.
Young poodle lopes up to the wire fence. Fan rotates slowly over the vacant kitchen. The day after you die, people still sip coffee in fast food joints as a thunderstorm gathers in the sky, newspaper headlines proclaim great events overseas, stupidity and corruption at home, suffering everywhere. In the video game arcade, someone sets a new high score for Tetris. House at the edge of the forest. One can hear the freeway here, but that sense of mass urgency feels wildly out of place. High above the canopy, a deep-throated, curling birdsong I've never heard before.
Catbird hops onto the grass. Carrying one side of the sofabed, he steps backwards through the moving van's side door, foot missing the long metal ramp, so that he falls from the side of the truck, the large couch crashing down in the dark vehicle, twisting as he drops to catch himself so that he hits the pavement with his hands out, right wrist shattering on contact. Woodpecker taps out a message. In the park, volunteer fire department uses the toddlers' climbing structure to practice blindfold maneuvers.
Wind in all these trees breathes. What bird answers the call of my alarm clock? Wooden children's climbing structure narrativized as a sailing ship, a Cessna, a train. In this scene the monkey has become an elephant and carries the pretend prince through the narrow streets of the city. Most of the volunteer fire crew are in their early 20s and stand around holding their heavy rubberized jackets, baggy pants held by red suspenders, passing a single pack of cigarettes between them as they watch the demonstration, fireman blindfolded, face mask covered by aluminum foil, crawling through the play structure, following the yellow rope headfirst down the slide.
Dinosaurs strewn across the vast plain of an attic rug. Fireflies glitter in the back yard, half moon making its way over the tops of these trees. Mall lot in which people don't appear to lock their cars. The beautiful dentist half jogs, is half dragged by her large dog, through the forest.
Bookcase full of children's toys, overseen by a bespectacled Mr. Potato Head in a green baseball cap. Every asset management program is built either from the procurement database out or from an inventory function up. Horizontalizing that work force made each member expendable. XXIV She demos the grill by serving "tater tots," hot dogs, sausage, in front of the hardware store on a Saturday from 10 until 2.
Book's spine is its sole moving part. When this you hear, so much to fear. In the dream, bobcats and cougars have multiplied and are killing the pets of North Berkeley. Squirrel gallops over the roof of this house. A quirk of morning. A quark of meaning.
Estimate the train's size just by the rumble of wheels over the tracks. Mom, she says, spent last summer in Siberia, "telling people about Jesus. At the station, a woman maybe 40 with the hard, drawn look about her of too many years of drugs or alcohol, cigarette almost absent-mindedly lodged between her fingers, bends down to speak gently with her beautiful, six-year-old daughter.
Take a message whomp. A walk in the woods: The western idea about money.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Online Poems
I hear the cardinal before I see it. Each toy truck offers its own theory of representation. Voice response unit, field replaceable unit. Then it grows quiet and dawn arrives. Rabbits become common, as does the American flag as a porch ornament. The tiger in the dale, the tiger in the dale. Jays in the trees mark distance in the background, one barely hears the steady rumble of a train.
Old man's features blurred by years of drink. What did I think? The absence of mail. Western name on his Social Security Card vs. The car, having sat in the humid heat all morning. Under the tall tulip poplar. Where yesterday I saw a rabbit successfully cross , today a wolverine, fatter than I would have imagined, by the side of the road. Catbird's call, sort of a yowl. Whistle in the cardinal's call. A bench at the end of the cul-de-sac under tall trees.
Still life still as the verb. Robin pauses, surveys his lawn. XXVI The breeze sucks the shade into the window's screen. A wheeze in the garbage truck's brakes. Red and blue birds flash in the trees. Lightning laces the sky. Real water boiling on a toy stove. Anxious to start the double play too quickly, he closes the glove before the ball is in it. Full moon smeared behind the scrim of cloud. Lilies shutting at dusk. The dream gauged by depth and completeness. The Wawa brutalizes the ice cream. Roar of the crickets all through the night.
Tee ball power drive. Humidity of a different planet. Theory of a turnpike. At the train station, the suburban poor become visible. Across the street, Cowboy's Tattoo Ranch.
A Map of the Night
Raising the seven-foot bookcase high, angling it around the banister at the turn of the stairs. Hummingbird's egg, the appearance of a white jelly bean. Red-tail hawk turns, high over Perkiomen Creek. Finches at the thistle sock, doe at the edge of the highway. YTD revenue for embedded systems. Realtor puts a plastic flag on each lawn for Independence Day. Big rigs in a row at the service plaza. Old lamp on a modern table, flowers etched in a base of glass. Light switch missing its face plate, having to put towels down by the shower just to turn the water on.
One cannot give an example of hapax without canceling the effect. Thrashing as a surrogate for emotion. Roofed-in porch perfect for a barbecue in the rain groundhogs in the grass, alas. The discipline of bottom feeders. Identify three routes between points A and B; list advantages and disadvantages of each. Read more Read less. Here's how restrictions apply. Illinois Poetry Series Paperback: University of Illinois Press February 5, Language: I'd like to read this book on Kindle Don't have a Kindle? Share your thoughts with other customers.
Write a customer review. Showing of 1 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. I liked the lyrical nature of the poems he wrote, but some were a little lacking. For me, a good poem has to have substance, but I missed some of that in this poetry selection. Perhaps I'm not looking deeply enough, but the best poems by David have always been his nature poems, and I felt this didn't have enough of those to form a complete collection. Sometimes his poems have compelling rhetoric that make you think deeply, and his style is at its peak.
Other times I feel there is no connection between his words and their actual meaning, just experiences he happened to write down. Lyricism, as usual, is great, top-notch, and needs no refining. Wonderfully written if you are a Wagoner fan, but if you can, try to get his latest book of collected poems, Traveling Light. That's my favorite poetry book right now. There's a problem loading this menu right now.
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