The Trailhead. Kerri Webster

<P>Song of the Husbands<BR>for Henry<BR> <BR>All winter the kind husbands hover <BR>like mortgaged angels. One <BR>smells gasoline in his sleep, would <BR>be my lover. They want me </P><P>to be well. Specimen, they say, and <BR>mean endearment. I row <BR>into the flood. The vodka </P><P>turns the lemon to crystal, the <BR>carp turn the pond to shit and hunger, <BR>the lingerie turns the trunkful<BR>of lingerie into a special trunk. <BR>And the husbands, the husbands</P><P>If asked they will install a water feature. </P><P>I tend my minor art, <BR>I push my sorrow cart, <BR>the women sing to the women o'er the prison <BR>walls: Daughters of Elysium!: as </P><P>I elysium myself to sleep and, <BR>waking, wear a <BR>poppy cast from silver around<BR>my neck. I grow<BR>ashamed of my teeth, I pawn, redeem, <BR>pawn, redeem, shoo </P><P>deer from the poison hedge. Oh<BR>leanmost season. Speak, <BR>husbands; speak, cocked <BR>honeys; speak!</P><P>"I'm learning to allow for visions," the primary speaker of The Trailhead announces, setting out through a landscape populated by swan-killers, war torturers, and kings. Much of the book takes place in the contemporary American West, and these poems reckon with the violence inherent in that place. A «conversion narrative» of sorts, the book examines the self as a «burned-over district,» individual and cultural pain as a crucible in which the book's sibyls and spinsters are remade, transfigured. «Sacralization/is when things become holy, also/when vertebrae fuse,» the book tells us, pulling at the tensions between secular and sacred embodiment, exposing the essential difficulty of being a speaking woman. The collection arrives at a taut, gendered calling—a firm faith in the power and worth of the female voice—and a broader faith in poetry not as a vehicle of atonement or expiation, but as bulwark against our frailties and failings.</P>