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Landscape with Silos"Bogen’s poems have a kind of unpretentious authority, sometimes ruefully realistic, sometimes quietly mysterious; the whole of Landscape with Silos goes to make something stronger and greater than its parts." ---Jean Valentine
"Here are poems of a lively intelligence, agile, wounded, and wise... quite simply a marvelous book." ---Betty Adcock "Deb Bogen writes poetry that is naked and necessary, unadorned and political, intelligent and generous. The book brims with intelligence. And reality." ---Carol Frost Moving the Moon I’m not interested in the shaggy horse (or is it a pony?) although it’s white. It’s usually dirty, comes into my mind with steam rising from thick fur. I close the gate, improvise some dark green and black, an undifferentiated thickness above which I put a moon for accent. Go ‘way horse. Shoo. Stop chomping, stop blowing clouds of heat. I stare away, increasing the darkness, inventing an owl, also white but perhaps oracular like the day the bird flew through the window, the day I spoke in tongues, white fire white iron heat. But heat brings back the horse, loaded with things to trade, short, stocky, not at all tired. So, this is an old landscape, one I’ve hidden from myself because it’s stupid. Dumb. Doesn’t speak, it insinuates a journey and embarrassed I try to erase the suddenly obvious owl before it drops a feather, before a single symbolically meaningful feather falls. But it’s dangerous to imagine owls, hard to blot them out, even with chemicals, scissors may fail, may leave another moon. The horse lowers its head, eats. Heat swells from the body and from the bales of hay laid out like giant erasers. Like desks in a dark classroom. Still if I took drugs this is where I’d go. I can’t banish the stupid white horse but I can move the moon, divide it, put it back together. I can draw any face on it I like. And the owl leaves the low tree to sit at my feet (owl on the ground, never meant to see that!) More things catch moonlight, come into being, distant silos, small acorn crowns, each post moon-washed and one-sided. It’s warm enough here to do without fire, but that’s it. No story. No arcane wisdom or poignantly revealed momentous event. I just like this quiet. And the owl who opens his one good eye. The horse keeps his head in the hay making heat. I prefer moonlight, I like the green to be almost black. I like a lot of space with nothing going on. A few white words and the rim of the milk pail polished and fine in my dark. ---------------------------------------------------- Moving the Moon first appeared in the Iron Horse Literary Review ---------------------------------------------------- Landscape with Silos One nail sticking up in a pile of boards, air bladders from fish brought home for supper, sugar in green glass bowls, glittering rattlesnakes. The palsied ghosts of cloudstained women, shadows of railroad men far from their homes, a deep-freeze filled with molasses cookies, broken concrete, lilacs, thunder. We drank water from old pipes, picnicked under windbreaks, peach pits and egg shells, and in the glove box roadmaps to the river, to the reservation, to Fargo and Minot. But no maps to the silos where men tended missiles so big we didn’t even dream about them. They didn’t scare us, those missiles, not the men either who rose like bankers, sat calmly at the counter, starched and pressed. Keys jingled on their belts. They ordered rootbeer and blackbottom pie. ----------------------------------------------------- Landscape with Silos first appeared in Poetry International ----------------------------------------------------- ISBN: 1-881515-93-1 |
