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04-16-2012
C. G. Hanzlicek
At a Lake In Minnesota
Walking the shore toward me
Is the farmer from across the road
A man with seven teeth
And forty acres gone to weeds
The bib of his overalls supports
A belly bloated
By pilsner and boiled potatoes
Each fifty paces or so
He baits and sets a steel trap
Tells me he’s after muskrats
Says these days their pelts aint worth
A nickel in a whorehouse
But the varmints ruin
The shoreline with their nests
This is a man who owns things
His body his mind
A lake and every foot of its shore
And if a woodpecker
Breaks through his sleep at dawn
A little jolt of birdshot
Will wipe it away
Clean as a fog of breath
Leaving his shaving mirror
After he’s rounded the point
I get the broom from the cabin
Beginning where he began
I touch the broomstick
To the baited tongue of each trap
A loud clack moves over the water
A satisfying sound
A life saved
A whole shoreline gone to hell
Stars
-It’s been estimated that atoms
in your body have been through
several stars—that they were
ejected many times as gas from
exploding stars.
-Jeremiah P. Ostriker
Seattle
Chief of the Suquamish and Duwamish
Said when a white man dies
He no longer loved the earth
He wanders among the stars
Shedding his life
Skin by skin
Until theres nothing but a shiver
Of light
But when a red man leaves the earth
He never forgets rivers
White with a new year
Deer dancing through scrub oaks
The hawk
Shaking the sky with his shriek
And the man often drifts down
To breathe the air of the living
To touch stone
To touch water
Crouched at the firepit
Of an abandoned camp in the hills
With my thumb I polished
The obsidian knife I’d found
Something moved through the pines
Almost like wind.
-from The Cave
BIO: C. G. Hanzlicek received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1964 and an M.F.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1966. He is the author of eight books of poetry including Living in It, A Dozen for Leah, Mahler: Poems and Etchings, Against Dreaming, and, most recently, The Cave: Selected and New Poems, which appeared in 2001 from University of Pittsburgh Press. He has translated Native American Songs, A Bird’s Companion, and Mirroring: Selected Poems of Vladimir Holan, which won the Robert Payne Award from the Columbia University Translation Center in 1985. His work has appeared in over a dozen anthologies and in many journals, including Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, North American Review, Hudson Review, and Iowa Review. In the summer of 2001, he retired from California State University, Fresno, where he taught for 35 years and was for most of those years the Director of the Creative Writing Program.