Eddie's best friend Auggie longs to get closer to God by looking for angels and demons in "Auggie Vernon and the Eclipse," no matter what the personal consequences might be.
In the collection's title poem "Love in the Time of Dinosaurs," the disillusionment, anger, and pathos of Eddie Madison's life as his marriage deteriorates is likened to the changes of the earth and its climate through long geological transformation, leading to an unexpected, startling conclusion.
Szeman's voice is simple and melodic, engaging and lyrical. Her themes are universal, encompassing the perspectives of men and women, adults and children, equally honestly. Though the line-breaks are often syllabic, and the stanzas formal, the language flows musically over the artificially imposed line-breaks. The poems' stories and characters have generated a multitude of fans who claim that, "for the first time, [they] understand contemporary poetry."
All of the poems in the collection have been previously published in literary and university journals, and many of the poems in this collection have been awarded prizes, including the University of Cincinnati's Elliston Prize (anonymous competition; 1983, 1984, 1985), and The Isabel & Mary Neff Fellowship for Creative Writing (1984-85).
Several poems were part of her dissertation, Survivor: One Who Survives (University of Cincinnati, 1986). Along with her Holocaust poetry collection, Where Lightning Strikes, this collection, Love in the Time of Dinosaurs, was unanimously accepted for publication by all outside readers of UKA Press in 2004.
As powerfully written, darkly humorous, surprising, and accessible as her prose works, these poems let you glimpse into the hearts, lives, and minds of ordinary people — whether they be mythological, biblical, literary, or contemporary — as they struggle to make sense of relationships, family, marriage, divorce, children, spirituality, faith, and the existence of God. As they struggle to comprehend the very things each of us experiences every day.
Read an Excerpt from
Love in the Time of Dinosaurs
(award-winning poems)
(begins on next page)
(Note: On e-readers, tablets, or Smartphones, you may need to use Landscape Orientation for some of the poems to see the original line/stanza breaks.)
Love
in the Time of
Dinosaurs
award-winning poems
Alexandria Constantinova Szeman
RockWay Press, LLC · New Mexico
Copyright © 1984-1986, 1987-2004, 2012
by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman
Contents
Love in the Time of Dinosaurs
Cain's Lament
Field Trip to the Serpent Mound
Eddie Madison and the Theory of Evolution
Auggie Vernon and the Eclipse
Love in the Time of Dinosaurs
Auggie Vernon Gets Struck by Lightning
Eddie Madison and the Law of Gravity
The Lies Our Parents Tell Us
Selling Your Brother
Portrait of the Poet as a Woman
Should, Should Not
Anniversary
A Cappella
Haceldama
Portrait of the Poet as a Woman
Among Children
Holiday
When the Animals Come Out
The Toast
When Bitterness Is All We Have
Holding Our Hearts in Our Hands like Rock
Group Portrait: During Eclipse
Group Portrait: During Eclipse
Penelope to Ulysses
The Strength of Stones
Counting the Thunder
Ahab's Wife
Blood Songs
Fireflies
Hearts, the Game
Speaking for the Dead
Field Trip
to the Serpent Mound
Once again our professor reminds us that we
have not come here to see the serpent mound but to see the
geological formations beside it, and
because we want the ten weeks' credit for only
five long, hot summer days, we dutifully turn our
attention back to the area, nearly five
miles in diameter, containing extremely
faulted and folded bedrock, Paleozoic
carbonates, sandstones, and shales, dutifully noting shatter
cones and the vertical fractures in the rock, all
uncommon in the normally flat-layered rocks
of Ohio, even southwest Ohio. But
it's the serpent mound that draws our eyes again and
again. That nearly quarter-mile embankment of
earth built by Indians a thousand years ago,
the gigantic snake uncoiling in seven deep
curves along a bluff overlooking Brush Creek, the
oval embankment near the end of the bluff most
probably representing the open mouth of
the serpent as it strikes. It's the largest and finest
snake effigy mound in North America and was
not built over any burials or remnants
of living areas as everyone once thought,
its massive body uncoiling, its huge earthen
mouth unhinged and open, ready to swallow down
anything foolish or blind enough to stumble
into its path. With an exasperated sigh,
the professor reminds us how the landowners
have been most cooperative in allowing us
to examine the site and will we please respect
their property and disturb it as little as
possible and please pick up that empty plastic
bag lying there in the thick ground vegetation
and will we shirkers please pay attention for once
in our lives? We obediently huddle around him, scribbling all
his words in our spiral-bound notebooks, thinking of
Moses instead, casting his rod down before the
Pharaoh so it might turn into a serpent and
devour all the serpents conjured up by the
Pharaoh's magicians and sorcerers. In a drone,
the professor points out the exposed bedrock and
the dolomite, shattered and brecciated, but we
think about snakes digesting everything but hair
and feathers, even teeth and bones. We think about
curved fangs and glistening scales and the tremendous size
of it all. During lunch with his favorite students,
gulping down tuna salad on toasted rye, the
professor explains that researchers have been studying the
possibility that the effigy may have
been laid out in alignment with various and
sundry astronomical observations. The
professor discusses the closely spaced fractures
and the undisturbed Pleistocene glacial till, while
we shirkers tiptoe around the serpent mound,
whispering about Medusa, her voluptuous
body and writhing nest of serpent-hair turning
us hard as stone. About the sweet illicit taste
of forbidden fruit and afterward our crawling
on our bellies and eating dirt all the days of
our lives, gladly, so gladly, with the sweet taste of
the fruit forever on our lips and tongue. After
lunch the professor patiently explains why the
serpent mound disturbance cannot be explained by
either the meteorite- or comet-impact hypotheses
or by the gas-explosion theory but may be
somewhat if only incompletely understood
as the result of some ancient volcanic or
tectonic activity, but we're thinking of
Cleopatra, with her dark hair and her milky
white breasts, bared to fangs which, when not in use, fold back
and lie flat, but which when used, spring forward and then
become erect. Ser
pent bodies long and cool and
hard, muscles undulating beneath taut snake skin.
Vipers' pits seeking out the heat, the damp moist heat,
trembling to the vibrations which reach us through the
faulted and folded Paleozoic structures.
Which stir us from our underground dens and thrust us
violently up along the fault lines, our bedrock
exposed. Which leave us shattered, gasping and spent, our
snake hearts dark and deep as the earth from which we came.
Should, Should Not
(after a poem by
Czeslaw Milosz)
A woman should not love a man, but if she does,
she should keep the child of their breath close to her heart.
A woman should not love a man, but if she does,
her house should be clean and tidy, her dinner pots
full. Her garden should smell of lilacs and roses.
A man, when he loves a woman, should not use words
that are dear to her, or split open her heart to
find what's inside. She should never look over her
shoulder when crossing over his threshold (or so
our mothers teach us). When she crawls into his bed
at night, she may memorize his sleeping face as
a reminder of what will not last forever.
Ahab's Wife
Must ye then perish,
and without me?
Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
Each night she stands in the open doorway, her hair
frenzied by the wind, a shawl around her shoulders.
After she bolts the door, she wanders through the dark,
empty rooms. As she passes the cradle, the child
whimpers, so she gathers him to her breast, then coos
him to anxious dozing. While he dreams, she gazes
down at him, brushes his soft cheek with her fingers.
She looks away, out the window, remembering
herself as a young child, still an orphan, even
in her uncle's house. One night in summer, she threads
blue ribbons in her dark hair, then lurks around the
parlor, hoping to glimpse the tall, gaunt visitor.
Her uncle sees her, swears, orders her to bed, but
the other says, Ah, Sarah, as he reaches for
her, as he lowers his tall, thin frame so that their
faces meet. Delicately, she places her cool
fingers on his cheek, on the scar. His palm brushes
over her thick dark hair, snags one of the blue silk
ribbons. Behind them, the fire spits. With the child in
her lap, she remembers another version of
herself — the young wife waiting on a wind-battered
wharf, clutching her son, as the murmuring crowd grows
still, as it divides itself like the biblical
sea. From the crowd's midst, he lurches forward, paler
than the scar on his cheek or the new-fashioned
leg. She holds up the child. Jacob, she says, offering
their son to him, but the child shrieks and grasps her neck.
He limps home alone. She stands and stares a long time
at the sea — his sea. Every night after dinner,
he paces his study, his new leg tapping on
the wooden floor, until he walks himself to sleep,
until he collapses in one of the large chairs.
Every night, alone in their vast bed, she hugs the
pillows as she curses her own hesitation,
her own trembling. Then one night, his loud cries wake her.
She rushes to him, kisses his clenched fists, bends his
writhing, shuddering form to her warm body, chants
his name until his eyes see her, until his voice
coughs out her name, until, with an animal sob,
his mouth chafes hers. Every night after that, they are
together. On their last night, she jolts awake in
their abandoned bed. She discovers him in the
child's room, over the cradle. Behind him, the wind
rattles the windows. The moonlight haloes his greyed
hair, glows on the child's face, glares on the new leg. She
calls to him, but he stays still. She grips his arm through
the coarse cloth. He doesn't move. Tomorrow his ship
will wrench away. She opens her eyes, aches with the
longing for him. It's too long since he's been
with her, too long before the sea surrenders him
to her again. The wind swells, heaves snow from the roof
with a thud. She lays the child in her bed, secures
the blanket on either side of him, drags her long
fingers through his dark curls, kisses his cheek, and sighs.
She waits by the window, gazing at his dark and
heaving sea as, all around them, pale-blue snow swirls,
climbs into steep crests, collapses upon itself.
Publication Acknowledgments
& Awards
Portions of Love in the Time of Dinosaurs have appeared previously (sometimes in altered form or under different titles, and under the name "Sherri" Szeman) in the following publications:
Journals
• Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review
• The Cape Rock (Southeast Missouri State University)
• Carolina Quarterly (University of North Carolina)
• Cedar Rock
• Centennial Review (Michigan State University)
• Cincinnati Poetry Review (University of Cincinnati)
• Chester H. Jones Foundation Poetry Competition Winners 1985
• Chicago Review (University of Chicago)
• Colorado-North Review (University of Northern Colorado)
• Cornfield Review (Ohio State University at Marion)
• Dark Horse
• DeKalb Literary Arts Journal (DeKalb Community College)
• Encore: A Quarterly of Verse and Poetic Arts
• The Great Lakes Review: A Journal of Midwest Culture (Central Michigan University)
• Hawaii Review (University of Hawaii)
• Images (Wright State University)
• Kansas Quarterly (Kansas State University)
• The Kenyon Review (Kenyon College)
• Midland Review (Oklahoma State University)
• Nebo (Arkansas Technical University)
• New Kent Quarterly (Kent State University)
• New Letters (University of Missouri-Kansas City)
• Ohio Journal (Ohio State University)
• Orphic Lute
• Piedmont Literary Review
• Poetry Today
• Portland Review (Portland State University)
• Soundings East (Salem State College)
• South Carolina Review (Clemson University)
• Southern Poetry Review (University of North Carolina)
• The Third Eye
• Wittenberg Review of Art and Literature (Wittenberg University)
• Writers' Forum (University of Colorado at Colorado Springs)
Books
• Survivor: One Who Survives (Ph.D. dissertation, original poetry, University of Cincinnati) 1986
Awards
• Chester H. Jones Foundation Poetry Competition, Honorable Commendation, 1985
• The Centennial Review Prize for Poetry (Michael Miller Award) for best poem published in 1984 (Michigan State University) 1985
• The Isabel & Mary Neff Fellowship for Creative Writing (University of Cincinnati) 1984-1985
• Elliston Prize, First Place (anonymous competition; University of Cincinnati) 1985
• Elliston Prize, Second Place (anonymous competition; University of Cincinnati) 1984
• Elliston Prize, Grand Prize (no other prize awarded)
(anonymous competition; University of Cincinnati) 1983
• Writer's Digest National Writing Competition, Honorable Mention, 1980
End Excerpt from
Love in the Time of Dinosaurs
(award-winning poems)
Buy
Love in the Time of Dinosaurs
(award-winning poems)
See
Love in the Time of Dinosaurs
(award-winning poems)
on Amazon.com
Back to Table of Contents
About
Where Lightning Strikes
(award-winning poems on the Holocaust)
Where Lightning Strikes includes all Szeman's Holocaust poetry, from the poems featured in her Ph.D. dissertation Survivor: One Who Survives, to the original versions of "Rachel's poems" appearing or mentioned in Szeman's award-winning, critically acclaimed first novel The Kommandant's Mistress.
The Kommandant's Mistress Page 37