As though a group of persons looking at one bird
had called themselves a flock. For me, the wooden kitchen, made
right-sized, fragrant, smoothed, the shy wood knife
alive beside the wooden bowl of wooden fruits.
For me. So last night when the high curve
so long over my life curved down where I could see it briefly
in a dream, where into my old fear my mother again said
look out this pretty window I did see the backdrop whole
and almost finished rolling by: big wooden smiling sun,
wooden air nailed onto wooden hills, wooden birds inside the trees,
and then the edge, and then the single uncut tree, my afterlife.
Kathleen Peirce teaches poetry in the MFA program at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Her books have been awarded The Iowa Prize, The AWP Award for Poetry, and The William Carlos Williams Award. The National Endowment for the Arts, The Whiting Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have provided fellowships in support of her work.
