Contents
Foreword: Solaces Gleaned from an Earth Poet’s Poem-Stories | David James Duncan
New Poems
Midsentence
Goat Dream
The Bear inside the Bear
Tributary
The Dam on Loup Run
April Prayer
For a Stray Dog near the Paper Mill in Tyrone, Pennsylvania
The Taxidermist’s Daughter Retrieves a Head
Free Write
Before My Mother’s Funeral
Pit Ponies
Eclogue for an Extractive Economy
Silt Psalm
Fishing with My Seventeen-Year-Old Self
The Wind Turbine Tech Speaks of Revolutions
After the Elk Hunt
Of This Failing
Vernal Pond
Apostate
Reservoir/Crows/Climate Change
The Doctor Asks My Friend to Follow the Light at the End of Her Pen
At Last I Can Understand What the Birds Are Saying
Wayfaring
Fishing with Nightcrawlers
Bare Limbs
This Shared Life
Deposition: What Was Lost
Last Baptism
A Friend Writes to Tell Me How Hildegard of Bingen Cried Viriditas!
Ditch Memory
from Coffin Honey
Buck Day
What I Know about the Last Lynching in Jeff Davis County
Ursus in the Underworld
Coffin Honey
Possum
Field Sermon
Taxidermy: Cathartes aura
dream elevator
Mother
Bear-Eater
Until Darkness Comes
In the Garden
Sitting Shiva
from Native Species
Almanac of Faithful Negotiations
Decadence
Goat’s Milk
After Twenty-Seven Years of Marriage
Native Species
How Our Names Turn into Light
The Rain that Holds Light in the Trees
The Turtle
Coltrane Eclogue
Gnosis
Returning to Earth
Thankful for Now
from Winterkill
Homily
Thieves
What My Neighbor Tells Me Isn’t Global Warming
Burn Barrel
Sulphur Hatch
By the Rivers of Babylon
The Last Time My Mother Lay Down with My Father
Poem Made of Sadness and Water
Canticle for Native Brook Trout
from In the Kingdom of the Ditch
Taxonomy
What I Told My Sons after My Father Died
Apophatic
Fishing for Large Mouth in a Strip-Mining Reclamation Pond near Lloydsville, Pennsylvania
The Poet Stumbles upon a Buddha in Game Lands 158 above Tipton, Pennsylvania
Crow Counsels Me in the Ways of Love
Nurse Log
The Sound of Sunlight
A Prayer for My Sons, after a Line of Reported Conversation by the Poet William Blake to a Child Seated Next to Him at a Dinner Party
from The Least of These
Doctrine
April Poem
Questions for the Artist
The Face of Jesus
Ananias Lays Hands on Saul
Confession
Puberty
Accident
Letter to Galway Kinnell at the End of September
Tree of Heaven
from Some Heaven
The Possibility of Rain
Somewhere Else
Prayer Requests at a Mennonite Church
Sleep
Jacklighting
Some Heaven
from Ripe
For an Uncle, Twenty-Four Years after His Passing
Fear of Flying
Building Walls
The Blind Man
Acknowledgments