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    Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods: Poems
    Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods: Poems
    Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods: Poems
    Ebook64 pages23 minutes

    Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods: Poems

    By Paula Bohince

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    About this ebook

    *Bohince grew up in Pennsylvania but has strong ties to NYC *Debut collection from an up-and-coming young poet: won the "Discovery"/The Nation Award in 2007, the Grolier Poetry Prize, and grants from the Puffin and Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. *Will be 2008 Amy Clampitt Resident Fellow in Lenox, Massachusetts *Blurbs from Stanley Plumly, Claudia Emerson, and Jane Mead
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSarabande Books
    Release dateJul 1, 2008
    ISBN9781932511987
    Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods: Poems

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      Book preview

      Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods - Paula Bohince

      ONE

      Prayer

      Adore me, Lord,

      beneath this raw milk sky, your vision

      of silvery cream comprising daylight.

      I’ve kept our appointment

      in the barn, board after board of pine

      hewn by us,

      sit beside the pig we chose

      for his mildness

      who smiles, now, in his waste.

      I abide by the chickadee

      who stutters in, a little obsessed

      with the mirrored chimes, her baffled image.

      Our saddles, oiled on thick nails,

      gleam from the walls like 3-D portraits.

      Something must be wrong

      or else you would answer—

      my father in heaven who speaks to me

      when no one else will speak to me.

      Landscape with Sheep and Deer

      I remember the arrhythmia of their movement

      across the drenched pasture,

      stuttering by my father would say.

      What I’m trying to say is remote as a cloud

      passing through woods, his face

      in a window above the pen,

      a clot of feeling.

      This must be about him, that man who kept them

      jailed and fed, who would not segregate.

      In his mind, they were one thing, moving through

      one place: sheep of the earth,

      the cloud-like sheep, and the earth-toned deer

      that belonged to the sky.

      Each morning, I filled the feed drum.

      Each day, I unlocked the gate, meaning I slipped

      a loop from one post to another. The slack

      of their limbs meant hunger; their eyes coming toward me

      was the anthem I lived by.

      O bookish sheep, painterly deer.

      Radiant heather and tiny white tongues of clover,

      soil glittering with the misery of rain.

      I felt something then

      in the approximate bones of a field mouse,

      horse flies spinning in the trough

      alert to the softening presence in the yard.

      I fought nothing.

      Every morning, I woke up knowing who I was,

      that the fence was real, its barbed wire,

      those rusted knots, salt lick

      glowing like a lamp.

      And though I can still see pretty hooves lifting,

      feel

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