Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize Honorable Mention, selected by the NEPC Board
Catullan
Some words some arrows and also wings
Pierce the heart to make it sing
Rug-burns on knees and the back spasm
That crick in the neck from kneeling
To pray with your mouth against the silent
Patch of nerves that delight in possessing
Silence as some form of light so sudden
It blinds the mind that thank you gods
Behind the eyes this light cannot think
I am the flowering weed grazed by every
Passing thing and guess what so are you
That’s how the field gets scattered with repair
Longer and longer the shadows grow
Until each one is full grown and has a voice
“Thank you, kid, for all this work,
all this toil, all that plowing, all those songs,
all the root-work that keeps birds in the air
where they belong.” Don’t call me kid. I’m no kid.
You ghosts in the undergloom always get it wrong.
Song of the—
Vague self who looking ahead says more
Time overflows what it fills but nothing fills it
Birds in uproar and the morning rabbit in the yard
Then it goes quiet and empty as in a dream
When fear and hunger give up the long chase
And death is just a chair in the grass not yet
Assembled
Then the dream of building time
But the tools make you blush they are so naked
And without shame
The children keep asking
To sit in your lap every day long after they’ve grown
Larger than you so large they could if they chose
Make their own chairs out of themselves
But they don’t
They run through the grass before it’s mowed
They run their fingers through the grass and whisper
Into the dirt below keep licking the sun
Keep tricking the worm keep bending your head low
And lower until the blade passes by
Don’t cry
Another thought will grow a head around it
Another word a mouth another moth a moon
Another mote a cloud another atom a sun
Once upon a time in the morning dew
A rabbit left her paw-prints a kind of poem
Written for no one but given to you
Who are you
Child made mostly of air and dust and water
Who became this walking cloud that speaks out
Loud thoughts the wind blows through your face
Moves you to another place mostly the same
As where you were before a minor elsewhere
Called another day another dream another nap
When you sleep standing up contemplating love
That you love that you love
These consequences of the made thing
Sibboleth
Each of us has repeatedly our own shibboleth
Husk tight against the ear, against the grain.
Exactly because no one’s eyes are wide as the world
We must each say to ourselves the word
And ask if we belong. To the river: do we
belong? To the olive on the twig: Do we?
How often at night the mouth works
Its own words by itself for no one’s hearing
Not even our own. Grain sleep of dreams
In which snow again buries the river and fields;
And also, the strange slow green beneath ice
Or in eyes. An “and” that acts like an “or.”
And those who in daylight say No pasarán
At night let us enter the holy land, the secret,
The cipher that says “I am.” Poor river
Flowing endlessly into itself, poor heart—
Babel’s bricks break down in the blood
and that Eden tree has a leaf still called a lung.
I carried the pebble of it all in my thought,
I came all this way to sing one song.
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.