Note to the Reader
Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod magna ac diam
Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.
When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.
Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.
This eBook edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this eBook possible.
For my parents
For my brother
In memory of Rose
Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street… If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.
Walter Benjamin, “One-way Street”
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.
Hart Crane, “At Melville’s Tomb”
Contents
V Twenty-One Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan
Copyright, Credits and Feedback Link
I
BEGETTING STADIA
I
for Marjorie Welish
Demands indefinitely specified,
demands incompatible with collective living
beget stadia
with indefinite seating
delicately tiered.
Resembling its shape
and therefore suggesting its function:
a wave.
Or repeating its shape
and therefore undoing its function:
a wave,
which I will here attempt to situate
in the broader cognitive process
of turning the page.
Just because these tears were on your face
doesn’t mean they’re yours.
The tree in your mind
is mine.
The redistribution of tears
reflects our collective commitment
to storm and stress,
to attitudes befitting participants in sports
and sports writing.
The conventions governing weeping in novels
do not apply to weeping done on-camera
or in teams.
Eldest sons dispossessed of ancestral tears
mock the tears of the nouveaux riches.
You call that weeping?
We call it sports entertainment
because the loser gets paid more,
because losing is hazardous,
because hazards are for losers
in the collective economy
of variable stars.
Rational actors wearing wrestling masks
would choose to lose collectively,
to collectivize losing
in
