Thread: Pilot Podcast
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Unread 02-25-2010, 11:06 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Fargo ND, USA
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Thanks Cathy and Nick. I was listening to Stephen Edgar's excellent readings at the Able Muse Tribute Issue yesterday. I found it very helpful to have the text in front of me, particularly in the poems where the stanzas are long, nonce, and heterometrical. That can't be done with this reading (it's not as necessary in my case), because all this stuff is forthcoming and the editors require first publication. Performance doesn't count. However the final big poem, The Chase was in the fall Hudson Review, so I shall paste that in here so that people can follow the reading in text.


The Chase

Now then, Glaucon, we must post ourselves (we philosophers)
like a ring of huntsmen around the thicket, with very alert minds,
so that justice does not escape us by evaporating before us.
The Republic (432b)

I. November 24

I whirl at the faint thunder of the flush,
snap off the safety, plant my backfoot boot,
shoulder the gun but do not shoot.
One wing flails feebly in the falling hush

as the bird swerves across the frozen bog.
It flaps about five rods, glides to the ground,
leaps skyward with a second bound
foiled by the canines of an airborne dog.

Here is the cock I winged two weeks before,
its crop crammed full of leavings from the corn,
its loss a disappointment borne,
but bird in mouth, the settling of a score.

The neck snapped is a mercy long deferred.
When our Alberta clippers start to blow
no slow starvation in the snow,
no fox or coyote will consume this bird.

I bear our trophy to the truck in bliss,
the proud retriever frisking at my knees.
Glaucon hunting with Socrates
could hardly have been happier than this.


II. December 8

Cascading from the cropland’s terraced shelf,
the sidehill western wheatgrass rolls away
and the seedheads of sideoats grama sway,
descending to the deadend basin’s shore.
The closest roadhead is a mile or more.
“Think like a rooster, Tim,” I tell myself.

Black-eyed susans have colonized the slopes,
feral reminders of the sunflower fields
abandoned when the weevils halved our yields.
in the foodplots whose flanking grasses drain
clumps of cattail topped by feathery cane
two practiced predators repose their hopes.

Windward we work to maximize surprise.
Four miles into this prairie white with hoar
Feeney pounces. Two lurking roosters soar
and fall victim to stamina and stealth,
weighting my vest with other-worldly wealth,
a pair of cocks purloined in paradise.

Contemplating the eldest of our arts,
I gut the birds and feed my friend their hearts.


III. December 15

I pick my slow way past the pockmarked sedge
where calves have kicked their divots,
then climb to hunt the upland’s grassy edge
rounding the center pivots
whose verdant verge I choose to stalk.
There breakfast lies within a rooster’s walk.

The prairie is a poem rarely read.
Its looseleaf pages blow.
Too many students of this landscape fled
its poverty and snow.
Today I limp on stiffening knees,
hoping that heedless pheasants take their ease

in pigeon grasses sprung from durum stubble,
in fragrant cedar shadow
where a boy watched his father down a double.
Maker of marsh and meadow,
grant me more time to understand,
more years to walk and memorize this land.
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