The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech
Page 7
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