Poetry

In the morning we found
40 acres of oaks
torn to the ground.

And for his human guests, imperial excess straining
all credulity: say a nightingale embalmed in honey
and stuffed in a swan […]

The Plat Book

cast our farm
and neighbors’
farms as flat […]

We dug potatoes from their cabinets of soil, watched
the belly of the earth turn over in its grave, a glimpse of flesh
through darkening ground, roots and greenlings—then the plow.

The pang and clangor of pitch-dense wood
in the stove and the odd, almost syncopated
pops of studs, joists, and rafters as they warm […]

In the alluvium of
the hot afternoon,
where the day’s clarities […]

At the lower fence line under the stars
he hears what at first he takes
to be the neighbor’s mare come
to investigate his apple pocket […]

If it doesn’t rhyme, it’s not poetry? Quick, somebody tell Shakespeare.

Two VQR contributors are interviewed for “American Experience.”

My neighbors’ dog, shut out of their house
a quarter mile uphill from us, has barked
all night, protesting.