344
here's to the indecipherable path home,
here's to the worm's sweat in the loam.
PARTISAN REVIEW
("Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light")
The animals are an integral element in the half promised land: they
are reminders of the nature of brutality and the human longing for
grace. If there is to be peace in the heart , it might be among them.
His job is honest and simple: keeping
the forest tidy . He replaces
after repairing, the nests
on their branches, he points every pine needle north .
("His Job Is Honest and Simple")
The last poem, "Triptych, Center Panel Burning,"
recapitulates the concerns of the book. The first section deals with
farm life, an uncle's odd sense of humor, the devotion of parents, a
cruel neighbor boy, and what seemed in the poet's childhood a more
ingenuous and generous America.
The second section, the panel that's on fire, contains some of
Lux's more powerful writing, a fusion of image and statement.
Is true that you get born dumb and bald as a ball–
peen hammer and as bald
and dumb you expire . So it's. In between
you choose to live in a manner you can live with.
Like a black piece of cheese you want to give back
all the lies and crooked imaginings.. .. all the sad
homilies . . . .
the knitting needles plunged into your ear
to quiet the mind's terrible machine.
you have to pass it back/not on .. .
the stupefacients fed us daily,
the quotidian humiliations and the rare
humiliations , all that which causes
the terrors , the bloody taciturnity, all
the blink-blown, irrevocable severings .
