The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech

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by Dobyns, Stephen;


  into his final coma, listened as his wife read a note

  from a friend who wrote: How could death matter

  since his prick had shuffled off its mortal coil

  some years before? And he laughed, he burped out

  a truncated snort, an enfeebled guffaw from fluid-

  packed lungs, and those of us with him laughed

  as well. Friends, to none will it come as a surprise

  to say we’re trudging toward the final dark

  or that to each of us in life is given a limited

  allowance of laughs. Save one, save one, to ring

  death’s doorbell and ease your final passage.

  Acknowledgments

  American Poetry Review: “Alien Skin,” “Casserole,” “Furniture,” “Gardens,” “Inexplicably,” “Laugh,” “Lizard,” “Monochrome,” “Never,” “No Simple Thing,” “Pain,” “Prague,” “Sincerity,” “Skin,” “Skyrocket,” “Song,” “Swap Shop,” “Technology”;

  The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Third Edition: “Leaf Blowers,” “Stars,” “Wisdom”;

  Boston Review: “Parable: Horse”;

  Great River Review: “Fly,” “The Miracle of Birth,” “Wisdom”;

  Narrative Magazine: “Mrs. Brewster’s Second Grade Class Picture”;

  New Letters: “Exercise,” “Niagara Falls,” “Persephone, Etc.,” “Recognitions,” “So It Happens,” “Stories,” “The Wide Variety,” “Winter Wind”;

  The New Republic: “Scale”;

  The New Yorker: “Determination”;

  Normal School: “Stars,” “Wisdom”;

  Ploughshares: “Crazy Times” (under the title “What You Should Have Thought About Earlier”), “Narrative”;

  Plume: “Melodrama,” “Statistical Norm,” “Water-Ski,” “What Happened?”;

  The Plume Anthology of Poetry 2013: “The Dark Uncertainty”;

  Shadowgraph: “Jism,” “Thanks,” “Valencia”;

  Southern Indiana Review: “Future,” “Leaf Blowers,” “Turd”;

  Terminus: “Parable: Fan/Paranoia,” “Parable: Gratitude,” “Parable: Heaven,” “Tinsel”;

  Union Station: “Good Days.”

  About the Author

  Stephen Dobyns was born in Orange, New Jersey, and has lived in twelve states and in more than thirty towns and cities, as well as having lived for nearly four years in Santiago, Chile. With his new book, he will have published forty books: fourteen books of poetry, twenty-three novels, one book of short stories, and two books of essays on poetry. He has taught at about a dozen colleges and universities, but most consistently he has taught part-time with the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, having begun in 1977 when the program was at Goddard College. He spent nearly two years working as a general assignment reporter for the Detroit News from 1969–71. From 1995 to 2007, he wrote about thirty feature stories for the San Diego Reader. His first book of poems, Concurring Beasts, was chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1971 by the Academy of American Poets. His fifth book, Black Dog, Red Dog, was a selection of the National Poetry Series (chosen by Robert Hass) in 1984. Cemetery Nights received the Melville Cain Award from the Poetry Society of America as the best book of poems published in 1986–87 (shared with Margaret Gibson). He has also had poems appear in the Best American Poetry series and has received Pushcart Prizes, as well as having received prizes from the American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and other magazines. He has received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and three awards from the National Foundation of the Arts. Two of his short stories appeared in Best American Short Stories and two received Pushcart Prizes. He has written many reviews and some articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Times Literary Supplement, and several literary magazines. He has three children and presently lives near the ocean in Westerly, Rhode Island.

  BOA Editions, Ltd. American Poets Continuum Series

  No. 1

  The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress

  W. D. Snodgrass

  No. 2

  She

  M. L. Rosenthal

  No. 3

  Living With Distance

  Ralph J. Mills, Jr.

  No. 4

  Not Just Any Death

  Michael Waters

  No. 5

  That Was Then: New and Selected Poems

  Isabella Gardner

  No. 6

  Things That Happen Where There Aren’t Any People

  William Stafford

  No. 7

  The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974–1980

  John Logan

  No. 8

  Signatures

  Joseph Stroud

  No. 9

  People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983

  Louis Simpson

  No. 10

  Yin

  Carolyn Kizer

  No. 11

  Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada

  Bill Tremblay

  No. 12

  Seeing It Was So

  Anthony Piccione

  No. 13

  Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems

  No. 14

  Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980

  Lucille Clifton

  No. 15

  Next: New Poems

  Lucille Clifton

  No. 16

  Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family

  William B. Patrick

  No. 17

  John Logan: The Collected Poems

  No. 18

  Isabella Gardner: The Collected Poems

  No. 19

  The Sunken Lightship

  Peter Makuck

  No. 20

  The City in Which I Love You

  Li-Young Lee

  No. 21

  Quilting: Poems 1987–1990

  Lucille Clifton

  No. 22

  John Logan: The Collected Fiction

  No. 23

  Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays

  Delmore Schwartz

  No. 24

  Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard

  Gerald Costanzo

  No. 25

  The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems

  Barton Sutter

  No. 26

  Each in His Season

  W. D. Snodgrass

  No. 27

  Wordworks: Poems Selected and New

  Richard Kostelanetz

  No. 28

  What We Carry

  Dorianne Laux

  No. 29

  Red Suitcase

  Naomi Shihab Nye

  No. 30

  Song

  Brigit Pegeen Kelly

  No. 31

  The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle

  W. D. Snodgrass

  No. 32

  For the Kingdom

  Anthony Piccione

  No. 33

  The Quicken Tree

  Bill Knott

  No. 34

  These Upraised Hands

  William B. Patrick

  No. 35

  Crazy Horse in Stillness

  William Heyen

  No. 36

  Quick, Now, Always

  Mark Irwin

  No. 37

  I Have Tasted the Apple

  Mary Crow

  No. 38

  The Terrible Stories

  Lucille Clifton

  No. 39

  The Heat of Arrivals

  Ray Gonzalez

  No. 40

  Jimmy & Rita

  Kim Addonizio

  No. 41

  Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum

  Michael Waters

  No. 42

  Against Distance

  Peter Makuck

  No. 43

  The Night Path

  Laurie Kutchins

  No. 44

  Radiography

  Bruce Bo
nd

  No. 45

  At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties

  David Ignatow

  No. 46

  Trillium

  Richard Foerster

  No. 47

  Fuel

  Naomi Shihab Nye

  No. 48

  Gratitude

  Sam Hamill

  No. 49

  Diana, Charles, & the Queen

  William Heyen

  No. 50

  Plus Shipping

  Bob Hicok

  No. 51

  Cabato Sentora

  Ray Gonzalez

  No. 52

  We Didn’t Come Here for This

  William B. Patrick

  No. 53

  The Vandals

  Alan Michael Parker

  No. 54

  To Get Here

  Wendy Mnookin

  No. 55

  Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems

  David Ignatow

  No. 56

  Dusty Angel

  Michael Blumenthal

  No. 57

  The Tiger Iris

  Joan Swift

  No. 58

  White City

  Mark Irwin

  No. 59

  Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999

  Bill Knott

  No. 60

  Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems: 1988–2000

  Lucille Clifton

  No. 61

  Tell Me

  Kim Addonizio

  No. 62

  Smoke

  Dorianne Laux

  No. 63

  Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems

  Michael Waters

  No. 64

  Rancho Notorious

  Richard Garcia

  No. 65

  Jam

  Joe-Anne McLaughlin

  No. 66

  A. Poulin, Jr. Selected Poems

  Edited, with an Introduction by

  Michael Waters

  No. 67

  Small Gods of Grief

  Laure-Anne Bosselaar

  No. 68

  Book of My Nights

  Li-Young Lee

  No. 69

  Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies

  Charles Harper Webb

  No. 70

  Double Going

  Richard Foerster

  No. 71

  What He Took

  Wendy Mnookin

  No. 72

  The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande

  Ray Gonzalez

  No. 73

  Mules of Love

  Ellen Bass

  No. 74

  The Guests at the Gate

  Anthony Piccione

  No. 75

  Dumb Luck

  Sam Hamill

  No. 76

  Love Song with Motor Vehicles

  Alan Michael Parker

  No. 77

  Life Watch

  Willis Barnstone

  No. 78

  The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940–2001

  Louis Simpson

  No. 79

  Is

  Wayne Dodd

  No. 80

  Late

  Cecilia Woloch

  No. 81

  Precipitates

  Debra Kang Dean

  No. 82

  The Orchard

  Brigit Pegeen Kelly

  No. 83

  Bright Hunger

  Mark Irwin

  No. 84

  Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems

  Lola Haskins

  No. 85

  Curious Conduct

  Jeanne Marie Beaumont

  No. 86

  Mercy

  Lucille Clifton

  No. 87

  Model Homes

  Wayne Koestenbaum

  No. 88

  Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey

  Barton Sutter

  No. 89

  Angels for the Burning

  David Mura

  No. 90

  The Rooster’s Wife

  Russell Edson

  No. 91

  American Children

  Jim Simmerman

  No. 92

  Postcards from the Interior

  Wyn Cooper

  No. 93

  You & Yours

  Naomi Shihab Nye

  No. 94

  Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems 1986–2005

  Ray Gonzalez

  No. 95

  Off-Season in the Promised Land

  Peter Makuck

  No. 96

  The Hoopoe’s Crown

  Jacqueline Osherow

  No. 97

  Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems

  W. D. Snodgrass

  No. 98

  Splendor

  Steve Kronen

  No. 99

  Woman Crossing a Field

  Deena Linett

  No. 100

  The Burning of Troy

  Richard Foerster

  No. 101

  Darling Vulgarity

  Michael Waters

  No. 102

  The Persistence of Objects

  Richard Garcia

  No. 103

  Slope of the Child Everlasting

  Laurie Kutchins

  No. 104

  Broken Hallelujahs

  Sean Thomas Dougherty

  No. 105

  Peeping Tom’s Cabin: Comic Verse 1928–2008

  X. J. Kennedy

  No. 106

  Disclamor

  G.C. Waldrep

  No. 107

  Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death

  Christopher Kennedy

  No. 108

  Sleeping with Houdini

  Nin Andrews

  No. 109

  Nomina

  Karen Volkman

  No. 110

  The Fortieth Day

  Kazim Ali

  No. 111

  Elephants & Butterflies

  Alan Michael Parker

  No. 112

  Voices

  Lucille Clifton

 

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