Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Poet of the week - Liz Waldner

We live in a dairy-farming area and, on occasion, have had cows on our lawn. (They invited themselves.) So we couldn't resist posting a poem that begins with "Cows on the spine of the hill..."

Where, Broken (the darkness
Liz Waldner

Cows on the spine of the hill like the spine of a book are some letters
Letters with legs; like an E and an L or an R that is squared like the box of the
body of cows
Like the spine of a book, the legs and the bodies of cows spell out the name and
maybe the head spells also the name of the book on whose spine is embossed
the name made of grass:
The light of the many days and the darkness the roots of the grass pull up out
of the hill and the light pushes down with the feet of the cows and the darkness
inside of the skulls of the cows, all these the name has eaten
The lines of the spines of the cows grazing the sky, the meeting of spine and sky
also marking the arcing edges of dark or light letters on dark or light pages
where, broken, the name grazes the thing it will know or mean or become
These are the choices.
However, there are other books.

From A Point Is That Which Has No Part by Liz Waldner, published by University of Iowa Press. Copyright © 2000 by Liz Waldner.

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