01-19-07
James Kimbrell
Allen’s Lake
It was the window I remember, and the moment
Before jumping to the woodpile and white grass.
It’s the blue breath of palominos
And the swinging gable-light, the frozen stubble
Against my wrists each night I crawled
Under the gate. And once, where the waves lipped
The rotted dock rafters, though I’d been warned,
I climbed out on the last slim beam
That jutted high across the water. Boots slick
against the frost-crystalled edges, I tightrope
stepped at least ten feet, and stopped there…
From that height, close to the star-bleared
Pine tips, I felt that lake take me into account.
I was another far object steeped
In the slow mist, a sound gathered together
Past a crooked beach of bank mulch
And snapped sticks, a catch
In the half-whistle of oaks. This was years
Before I’d seen how easily a body could get lost
In that mud-stumped, Hind’s County cold,
Or how old saw-toothed boards
Are bridges over bones that sink
To the bottom of winter. I stood there,
Shivering, five minutes of luck, confident
That even falling could last forever. Arms scarecrowed
For balance, I listened in my careful
Backtracking to the wind
Tumble into a north-facing gust, white ribs
Of moon breaking on the water, one layer
Of light coming down,
one layer of light slipping under.
Mt. Pisgah
It was the middle of the night and I had lived
A long time with that country, with the hay
Rakes and rock paths and the beam bridge
Above the snake-thick waters. It was
The middle of the night so far into the field
The deer began not to notice the moons
In the shallow bean row puddles. That's how dark
Fell over the road that led into town and kept us
All from moving. Still, when the train passed,
Milk shook in its bucket and the earth sank
In a little. So each year when the corn shrank
Back to stubble, the mud strewn with husks,
More than anything silence grew tall there
Between the kitchen window and the shed's
Roof and the one note rust made in the stuck
Weather vane, in the rooster holding north.
-from The Gatehouse Heaven
BIO: James Kimbrell, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Missouri-Columbia, MFA, University of Virginia, M.A., Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, specializes in poetry. He has been the recipient of the Whiting Writer's Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the "Discovery"/The Nation Award, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and has twice received the Academy of American Poets Prize. Recent poems, reviews and translations have appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Poetry, Field, Fence, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, The Boston Book Review, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets. He recently received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. His first collection of poetry,The Gatehouse Heaven, was published in 1998.