Once again, The Nation announces the winners of Discovery/The Nation, the Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize. Now in its twenty-seventh year, it is an annual contest for poets whose work has not been published previously in book form. The new winners are: Amy Beeder, Bryan Dietrich, Monica Ferrell and Joanna Goodman. This year’s judges are Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips and Marie Ponsot. In the competition, whose manuscripts are judged anonymously, distinguished former winners include Susan Mitchell, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Sherod Santos, Arthur Smith and David St. John. This year’s winners will read their poems at Discovery/The Nation ’01 at 8:15 pm on Monday, April 23, at The Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue (92nd Street and Lexington Avenue) in New York City.
–Grace Schulman, poetry editor
Give to Her Your Cloak Also
I understand the necessary lie,
that pasty face he passes off for work,
the interest vested in his paper
tiger. But, frankly, three in a bed
is not what I had planned. Each night
that I slip–calling him, from some stark peak
of passion, Clark–the covers grow more
crowded, the issue, more cumulous.
To which side do I cleave, then? On which
thunderous thigh do these nails leave
no trace? Though there are times I enjoy
such naughtiness (the occasional
quick one in Perry’s office, a hot kiss
on the fly), I still find it hard
to divide time between what he is
and what he’s had to hide to be just
that. Don’t get me wrong, Diary, I love
the both of him, but these days, when I send
him out for squeeze cheese and chips, when
he comes back, Midway Mart sack in one
hand, would-be thug in the other, I can’t
help wondering…. Should I prefer this
Superman who saves a world a week,
or he who’s learned to live his life
by loaning it his cheek.
BRYAN DIETRICH
‘The soul is a number moving by itself’ –Aristotle, De Anima
It is not cold at the top of the stairs.
The years strike like radium drops.
There is a little door, there is a little lock,
There are many good machines whose purposes are lost.
In the plump and tidy cabinets
The red drawers are full of numbers
Irrational and fatly simpering,
While the white drawers have numbers
Imaginary and drifting,
And I am one of those.
Oh, the furnace wheezes, the charwoman sweeps,
The wood sighs and settles and the dormouse sleeps.
Don’t try to look at me directly.
MONICA FERRELL
Rooster Shadow
It’s not by chance that as this house turns to rot,
the outer rooms fill up with feathers: jackdaw
and grackle black, grit-colored slivers of sparrow
or finch that grub for crumbs on every sidewalk.
Don’t be fooled by thrash or rapture:
a bird is only vitriol, a lizard’s foot,
gristle and a sack of stones, diviner of nothing
but endings. If you doubt it, think of cockfights
or starlings’ pulse against the rain-wet glass
each Spring returning to shock you,
a darkness like blood in the yolk. Spurious, plagiarist–
Amid thick leaves I saw the wink of black eyes
waiting in dark pines, the snow-broken greenhouse.
On my stairs is a long rooster’s shadow;
nights the rafters host a storm of chatter, the breeze
of a thousand wings; though in the morning
dirty legions can rise silent from one winter’s tree.
AMY BEEDER
Tebaide
Ahead, no singular, no grief.
Silicon retina, artificial cochlea, tongue:
we are learning how best to transcribe spirit
by tracking chemical release. To cobble
soul and sense together open here,
the nerve: insert. Localized
interior. My room looks west, and north;
late day’s gray veneer aroused by breeze.
Months pass, moth-filled and uncontained,
since we slipped through ovals in San Marco’s
dormer cells, looking down through glass to see
back towards black mountains’ robed retreat,
blue fields, hands floating out of time.
It was neither mystical nor real, but it was both.
A thin lather of rain fell last night.
I woke at four again and listened to first birdcalls swerve
along the eaves. Voices scored for feeling
and depth: tassled, metallic rows of rants
unravel meridians. Immediate, unmediated world.
The talk here’s about sacrifice–
Who would give up body first, who mind.
I try not to be seen or heard, though apparently
all we want is to be found.
*
Risen chambers along twigs of black gum,
butternut: buttercup playing Camaldoli’s
forest floor. I held one to your chin, silence
stretching light’s expanse between us. Measured
rhythms, equilibriums: that the shapes might
fit; mass to rhapsodic mass, vein to leaf, leaf
to branch; error to its thought; that in the symmetry
between hand and touch we might find not just relief.
I’ve lost track of how I’ve hurt you.
Out of stone huts hermits emerge
like mist’s cargo, dissolve without blundering
into air. They’ll come down the mountain
in old age. We watch from outside the gate–
Smoke curls skyward–
*
And darkness corked by light.
In this night scene the first bridge, built
out of the first man’s mouth, makes the world make
sense. One theory says God fell in love and in letting go: matter. Between death and dream breath’s vanishing,
the broken parts, bring us back to each other–
erasures, secco-frescoed molecules–
malachite, ultramarine, lead tin yellow,
flaking with time, vine black triangles
where a branch once held the tree trembling in place.
JOANNA GOODMAN
