I’d say the werewolf is a lucky guy.
He gets to read the moon and memorize it,
howl out the lunar text in fluent lupine,
and when the lyrics pall and the moon grows old,
he reverses himself—but reserves his second self,
leaving his fur in a spot at the edge of the wood.
His latent talent’s a two-sided coin—
except that, heads or tails, both sides are downsides:
the werewolf enterprise is either/or,
where neither option wins the day (or night).
Author: Deborah Warren
Deborah Warren’s books include The Size of Happiness (2003, Waywiser Press); Zero Meridian (2004, Ivan R. Dee), winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize; Dream With Flowers and Bowl of Fruit (2008, Evansville), which won the Richard Wilbur Award, and Ausonius: The Moselle and Other Poems (2017, Routledge). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Yale Review. In 2021, her book Strange to Say: Etymology for Serious Entertainment and her book Connoisseurs of Worms are forthcoming from Paul Dry Press.
Closer
Like a muffled metronome
behind me, there are footsteps walking—
much too close. I cross the street,
because it must be me they’re stalking.
But the cadence of the feet
in iambs on the dim concrete
comes closer, closes in, repeating
in my ribs: my own heart knocking
and outrunning me—a clock,
its hands quicker than feet. It’s beating
time, a tuneless shadow locked
inside me, where I hear its omen
sure-footed and close to home.
Everything is Light: Frozen Charlotte by Susan de Sola
Frozen Charlotte: Poems
by Susan de Sola
(Able Muse, 2019, 126 pp., $19.95)
The magnificent seascape/ice-scape on the cover of Frozen Charlotte, Susan de Sola’s new poetry collection, is all blue. But, like the book’s contents, it coruscates with light. Dip into the book, browse through it, or read it nonstop: you emerge with an after-image that’s all color. If I had to capture these poems in one word? Color.
Down-to-Earth
In the field the coyote yip-yips imminent danger;
……….the dog in the kitchen rumbles a basso growl;
the field sends back a shrill elastic baying;
……….the kitchen gives a soprano howl.
These two aren’t discussing climate change,
……….war, flu, layoffs; in this dialogue
a well-informed coyote’s not relaying
……….to a pessimistic dog
grounds for worry—national cases of mange,
……….the mountain lion population swelling,
a cougar-sighting fifteen miles away—
……….only a future close enough to smell.
Pressure
Put a little pressure and heat on rock,
give it time, and shale turns into slate.
It’s the same with calcium carbonate
slowly reinventing itself as chalk.
Limestone’s in no hurry; it started to harden
during the Lower Jurassic into marble.
Graphite spends millennia on diamond:
The luxury of eons.
………………………………At any rate,
slow or slower, they move in mineral time
with plenty of leisure for maturing late.
Nice for them. I have a different clock,
skin-shallow. Animals can’t afford to wait.
C. elegans
Caenorhabditis elegans : genome sequenced
Ground-breaking news about the nematode
C. elegans—an even simpler beast
than they had thought, with a genetic code
nineteen percent identical to yeast.
And now I hear the sequencing machines
associate me with him—with vermin—by
festooning us in matching strands of genes:
A common heritage I can’t deny,
but a worm—he’s less than dirt, the über-low
doormat to the world, bred to submit
and never turn (except earth-clods), and so
unprepossessing. Except I’ve also read
how it’s supposedly the meek who hit
the jackpot—the big legacy—and earn
what great H. sapiens inherited:
the earth that elegans was first to turn.