Adrian Blevins

First Winter in Maine

As regards my recent silence there was just too much to say.
Yes I mean the forest of late summer becoming the forest of fall
becoming the charismatic forest of mute and callous intent.

O yes I mean the snow forest becoming the first forest
just beyond the glass door we put there deliberately
to stare at the trees that have nothing at all to say, if you’re willing

to listen: just the branch going down and some kind of lion
rising—just the fox and raccoon looking hard with me looking back
with just my boys in my head since they’re gazelles by disposition

who won’t be protected from any aspect of the forest
but must stand smack-dab in the middle of the wreck
that isn’t the wreck of the weather, but the wilder, harder wreck

of the missing father and abstracted mother that’s the hard-line wreck
of the hard-listening inside that by disposition and genetics
will lean them against the pine and alder and snow birch

for six seven eight nine months of whatever we are when we lock our mouths
to mourn our losses from the insides of our jackets and black wool caps
with just our eyes in our faces and the lungs in our chests

in the flabbergasted shut up of sucking and sucking and sucking it in.

Now There's A River

Death to the savage little bitch that I was. Death to her fringe and to her pie.
Death not to the memory so much of her long blonde hair, but death
to how and why she tossed it. Death to that skinny, infantile idiot’s idiocy,
death to her lesser breasts. Death to Skynard’s freebird and every last
Firebird, death to the dogwood under which she’d sulk. Death to Scarlet-the-prototype,
death to the theory and practice of the black velvet dress. Not and never death

to the South—no!—but death to some of its women and more of its men—

death to the handkerchief, death to the crystal vase and bitten lip and silk slip
and tittle-tattle time of tea. Death to the bow tie. Death to Washington and Lee!
Death to the football game, death to the boys’ jerseys and tires—death to their fingers
and dicks—death to that icy girl’s icy piccolo: death to her legendary silver barrette
and the old mahogany dressing table on which it lay, death to her curling iron
and most categorically now on the Kennebec at the start of the summer

of her forty-first year, wild-hell-and-smash death to her heart that was bone.

The Interrogative Sentence

Do you realize nothing you say will ever make any difference
because all you do is squawk out thumps in the futile rage of birds?

Do you agree that birds sing syrupy in April but livid in June?

Is that because the birds’ delicate, home-birthed nestlings
have moved into their own condominiums and are now sharing recipes for margaritas with their excessively-sexual neighbors?

Or is it the impending snow that gets them so frantic and mad?

How do birds know about anything that’s impending?

Do they also know that the sonnet has only one forefather and that that is the plow
and that the plow’s forefather is the shift from season to season and from day to night and that you should have said foremother just now

but did not think to do it until it was too late?

What are you supposed to think when the plows are tractors
and the tractors are air-conditioned and the air-conditioning chills you
even when it’s one hundred degrees outside and all the plants are flaccid?

Do you realize your X and not-X husbands are completely unalike
and therefore can’t stand one another

but are unable to admit it, being Neanderthals who prefer silence to hurtful talking?

What kind of talking is not hurtful?

Do you think the husbands are probably right?

Do you think you’re a tyrant?

Do you think you’re stuck in your own bed of words and that the world could explode for all you could care as long as you some had literature with you

as long as you had not written it yourself?

Is that why you’re so tired?

—break—

Is it true that you love nothing more than your children, except writing?

Is it true that you neglect your children for writing the way your father did you
when he’d paint and you’d squawk

and nothing you ever said made any difference

because that’s the way he was and you got his syndrome

which is the syndrome of the uncorrectable sorrow
that enters the painter’s eyes and the poet’s mouth?

Are you the bird you know you are and is rage your middle name?